Judgement at Nuremberg/Judgement at the Tom Hanks Fan Club
Tom Hanks is the same age as Spencer Tracy when he appeared in "Judgement at Nuremberg". Both men were massive film stars in their time. Spencer Tracy looks haggard and old, in one scene he looks longingly at a beautiful German girl in her twenties who says "Goodbye Grandad" to him. Hanks has become dowdy and has filled out, the last time Hanks has been sexy in a film was in 1998 in "You've Got Mail" where he kisses Meg Ryan, there is no sex for Tom Hanks. The roles he takes are somewhere between prestige and action films, with the occasional foray into vaguely arthouse films - after all adaptations of Dave Eggers probably have a lesser appeal than barely articulate bestsellers by Dan Brown. Barely articulate in this sense..."Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes."
Didn't think that you anyone in the family would have read any Dan Brown but yeah, there is a reason to avoid such books. Pulling the sentence mean did the eyes puncture the parchment paper? How does a face "overhang"? What is exactly precarious about her body?
The larger questions I want to ask are around the representation of age, looking at Tom Hanks, but not in the most recent Dan Brown movie, and Spencer Tracey in "Judgement" at Nuremberg. The movie "Bridge of Spies" is a better exemplar, as both films plot centre around an older male character, are American centric so the frame of reference is the American experience and not German, the narrative is formed around one character's perspective of coming to Germany to deal with a specific post-war problem.
The inception of both of the films was mediated by time, in "Judgement in Nuremberg" the film was released in the early sixties, a time in Germany when the post-war consensus around amnesia of historical grievances was beginning to be challenged, and in "Bridge of Spies", a film released in the tweens, in a time where issues around security, espionage and geopolitics are frightening and real, and is set in the divided Berlin of the Sixties, of the DDR and its vast security apparatus funded and trained by the KGB.
But it is the main character that both of the films puts their emphasis on. Hanks plays an insurance lawyer. He's good. He's too good. He's so good that he saves the day in two hours and twenty two minutes. The film moves at a brisk pace, enough to introduce a swathe of subsidiary characters. But it is Tom Hanks humane everyman that is the key focus of the film, in these sort of roles he becomes the Gregory Peck or the Cary Grant that is lacking in contemporary cinema. Tracy plays a judge from some small town that is pulled to Germany to sit as a presiding judge in one of the Nuremberg Tribunals. The film creates a sort of facsimile of the different motivations of the Nazi judiciary, and slowly builds up the case against the Nazis while simultaneously presenting the reasons why Germany forgave and forgot the crimes of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. It is a long and poignant film, that tries to be as balanced as possible. There is this flamboyant German laywer who says he won't appeal to emotion and then gets angrier and angrier as the trial goes on. There's heaps of good stuff in the film, also the camera work is glorious inventive. So many slow zooms and tracking shots around characters.
But as much as both films are about their context, they also use age to colour the audience's understanding of the main character. That is sort of their personality, reduced down to it, they are old men. Spencer Tracy spends some time with Marlene Dietrich?! an Wehrmacht widow, it is sort of sexy, the films definitely implies that they could be a thing. But lingering over their relationship is the horror of the Holocaust, of his perception of her complicity in it. During the film, their relationship sort of peters out, there is this weird scene in a bar where everyone is singing and jolly and drinking beer. And Tracy looks really haunted, and Dietrich guilty as hell. It never implies what Tracy's relationship status is, but once he finds all the judges guilty the Wehrmacht widow doesn't see him again. But he does seem really old, when the film brings up the historical case of an older Jewish man who is found guilty of race defilement by entering into a relationship with a sixteen year old they bring out Judy Garland who looks dowdy and old too. This film is really effective at making everyone look at least fifty. Apart from that dynamic German lawyer, who got an Oscar for the role. Maybe because he didn't look so old.
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