Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg

This post is part of Nathaniel's Montgomery Clift Blog-a-Thon, which is occurring today over at The Film Experience Blog.

Forty-one years after his birth, thirteen years after he burst onto American movie screens in The Search and Red River, five years after a near-fatal car accident left his face scarred, and five years before his death, Montgomery Clift took the stand in Stanley Kramer's post-WWII courtoom epic Judgment at Nuremberg. He plays Rudolph Petersen, a simpleminded man who had been forcibly sterilized by the Nazi regime.

The parallels are perhaps too easy for comfort: Clift plays a broken, semi-coherent man stuck in front of hundreds of people and asked to relive his emasculation; Clift was a broken man whose physical and mental deterioration, helped along by hearty drug and alcohol addictions, caused him to flub take after take. Stanley Kramer later wrote about Clift's difficulty with his lines:

"Finally I said to him, 'Just forget the damn lines Monty. Let's say you're on the witness stand. The prosecutor says something to you, then the defense attorney bitterly attacks you, and you have to reach for a word in the script. That's all right. Go ahead and reach for it. Whatever the word may be, it doesn't really matter. Just turn to [Spencer] Tracy on the bench whenever you feel the need, and ad lib something. It will be all right because it will convey the confusion in your character's mind.' He seemed to calm down after this. He wasn't always close to the script, but whatever he said fitted in perfectly, and he came through with as good a performance as I had hoped."

Unlike in his other post-accident films, there's no effort to hide his various maladies. Instead of favoring his unscarred right profile, Kramer's creeping camera executes its typical (and eventually annoying, but not by this point) slow circle around him, starting with a frontal closeup and moving to the right, showing off Clift's twitching left cheek and slightly sagging left eyebrow. As it creeps around him, we see that his head is nodding a bit, and his skeletal hands are twitching. How much of this is acting, and how much of it was unconscious?

Whatever it was, he's riveting. His seven-minute scene begins with him walking, self-consciously upright, to the witness stand before hesitating, in a curious pose that reminded me of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, before sitting down. Under the gentle questioning of the prosecuting attorney (Richard Widmark), he's composed, recounting the story of his trial and sentence, tiptoeing around the specifics of his forced operation. His wary face melts into childish pleasure when the audience or the judge (Spencer Tracy) shows approval, but for the most part he's closed up. But his composure shatters under the relentless cross-examination of the defense attorney (Maximilian Schell), whose theory of defense—essentially a version of the morally repugnant "we were just following orders"—holds that the defendants, all judges accused of enforcing immoral laws, were in fact justified in ordering his sterilization because it was the law of the land to sterilize "mental defectives."

Clift starts getting "fuzzy," for lack of a better word. His right eye seems to brighten, then to glaze over; he slumps further in his chair, almost hiding behind the sparse protection of the microphone, and several times has to remind himself to sit up straight. His shoulders hunch, and as Schell's questions agitate him further, he loses his tenuous cool: his movements become more exaggerated as he shouts about the essential unfairness of his treatment and Schell's insinuations about his mother; ironically, the physical symptoms I mentioned above disappear, the quivering and unconscious movements replaced by strong gestures. His responses become incoherent, and his breakdown, a combination of a spirited defense of his mother and a cry of anguish at the way he was treated, is difficult to watch.

Schell takes the fact that Petersen is proved to be not much smarter than a child as a win for the defense, because German law at the time said that it was right to sterilize him. But Clift's performance helps hammer home the point of the scene, which is that such a defense is an immoral sham. The horror this lost, confused man-child experienced in a courtroom a dozen years before is indistinguishable from the horror he's facing on the stand today, except that there was no chance at justice in the Nazi court. His testimony is helping to achieve some today, not that it's any consolation to him.