The Magnificent Seven (All-Stars)
Stanley Kramer had worked with starry casts before. But with one exception, the star power stopped at three or four:
The Pride and the Passion(Three): Grant, Sinatra, Loren
On the Beach(Four): Peck, Gardner, Astaire, Perkins
The Defiant Ones (Two) Poitier, Curtis
The one with a lot of stars was from 1955: Not as a Stranger , a hospital doctor drama with Mitchum, Sinatra, DeHavilland, Gloria Grahame, and Broderick Crawford(a few years out from a Best Actor Oscar and still starrish.)
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But none of those casts quite matched what Kramer pulled off with Judgment at Nuremberg. Seven major stars, almost each of them able to lead the cast of any given movie just on their own.
It was all in a good cause. Kramer knew he had a long, grim, talk-infested story to tell about the aftermath of WWII and the question "What do you do with the Nazis and can you indict an entire nation?" The Holocaust appears as well -- with grim documentary footage(though the Holocaust is treated with less than the full horrified reverence it is today. More below.)
But anyway, the only way to get this one studio money was, evidently, to cast stars all over the place. And what a set:
Spencer Tracy: Tracy had worked with Kramer on "Inherit the Wind" (1960.) Little did Tracy(or Kramer?) know that four out of Tracy's final five films would ALL be with Kramer, including the final three. (Only the turgid volcano drama The Devil at 4 O'clock, with Sinatra, broke the pattern.) The studio wanted James Stewart to play the American jurist who tries to control a fight between America and Germany in a German courtroom -- Kramer demanded Tracy.
Burt Lancaster: Coming off his 1960 Oscar for Elmer Gantry, Lancaster was perhaps the most bankable star in the cast at the time. He took over a role intended for Laurence Olivier, and donned old-age make-up and a moustache to play it. He was also paid more than Tracy. Tracy took rueful note of this in interviews and added, "and Lancaster said he'd do it for nothing."
Richard Widmark: Nuremberg shows Widmark's strengths and his weaknesses all in the same role. The weakness: after an initial period of getting top billing in films, he ended up spending his days "above the title as the second-billed guy." It was a backhanded compliment: Widmark was always a star, but just a little bit less of a star than co-stars John Wayne(The Alamo) or James Stewart(Two Rode Together) or William Holden (Alvarez Kelly.) In 1967's "The Way West," Widmark was billed as one of three stars in the movie(Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum were the other two) and somehow Widmark seemed unnecessary compared to the more fiery Douglas and the more cool Mitchum.
Marlene Dietrich: A great German star, who resisted Hitler and here chose to play a role in which her German character tries to make the case that the entire country wasn't bad, and the entire country didn't know about the Holocaust. Interesting casting...and usually in dialogue scenes with Tracy, who in his prematurely white-haired age, brought Dietrich to youthful life.
Kramer perhaps too knowingly brought in two other once-major stars for "glorified cameos" of unquestioned power:
Monty Clift. His face now ravaged from a 1957 car accident, his acting stilted and short-circuited as much as a matter of his true personality as of the mentally damaged man he played.
Judy Garland: She's got that voice and that emotion but alas, she's puffy in the face and dumpy in the body. And its only 23 years after The Wizard of Oz.
Garland and Clift had very public problems with substance abuse, and they enter Judgment at Nuremberg as wounded animals, hard to watch, hard to turn away from . (There was a third damaged soul in the picture -- Spencer Tracy, way prematurely aged at 60 or so from years of drinking and pills.)
That's not seven. That's six.
The seventh was the guy who won the 1961 Best Actor Oscar for his role in this, and who was the best looking guy in the movie -- cuter than Lancaster OR Widmark. And reeling off line after line after line of complex dialogue in English even as he was German.
Maximillian Schell. Schell got a career out of this that started just as many of the other six stars were winding down. But he WAS a star, for a time.
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Two thoughts came to my mind watching the seven stars of Nuremberg play their roles:
ONE: "A movie star is a product." This was Cary Grant's belief, the idea being that when a star is hired to be in a movie, the producers are hiring an entire "package deal" of persona and history.
TWO: "A movie star is unique." Said one agent, "There is only one Blue Boy painting. There is only one of any given star." Granted, some stars look like other stars or come close to acting like other stars, but the star is the original mode. Note in passing: the career of James Whitmore was evidently designed, in the beginning , to give audiences a newer, younger Spencer Tracy.
The drama is great in Nuremberg, the argumentation harrowingly balanced. (Dietrich says dismissively of the Holocaust films, "(the Americans) always bring out those films when they need them, but they don't speak to what was really going on here.") The irony, thick: Military prosecutor Richard Widmark's top brass wants him to go easy on the Germans "because we will need the help of the German people in the Cold War. Its a matter of survival."
But behold a group of solid stars in Judgment at Nuremberg, several of them in the twilight of their careers and yet proving why they became stars in the first place.
All this...and William Shatner, too. And he gets to play most of his scenes opposite Spencer Tracy.
On Tracy. He spends much of this movie saying very little until he gets his big speech at the end. But just watch how he listens to a drunken Richard Widmark at a restaurant talking of how WWII seems to have been given over to "the Boy Scouts" for justice. Tracy listens carefully to Widmark and his every expression is masterly, the stuff of superstardom.
Not bad for an old man.