Nuremberg

Reviewed by:
John Walsh

Like everything else, the change from current event to historical trivia is faster now than it ever was. The Holocaust and the subsequent Nuremberg trials took place less than 60 years ago, but they’re part of a world that in many respects doesn’t exist anymore. Dramatizations like TNT’s Nuremberg, about the world’s first international war crimes tribunal, can feel less like a movie than a historical pageant.

Fortunately, this two-part TV movie seeks more to entertain than to educate. While much of the dialogue is taken from actual trial transcripts, the story is as much about the challenges lead prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson faced outside the courtroom as inside.

“Jackson knew the magnitude of what the Nazis had done, and he wanted the convictions to be perfect,” says Alec Baldwin, executive producer and star of Nuremberg. “The French and the Russians were saying, ‘Let’s take them in the basement right now and shoot them.’ Jackson wanted people to say that the defendants had a fair trial.”

That conflict among the tribunal’s judges and other key Nuremberg figures is the real story here. Christopher Plummer co-stars as an English tribunal panelist, whose friendship with Jackson outside the courtroom provides some welcome comic relief. Brian Cox is charming, witty and unbelievably creepy as Herman Goering, and Matt Craven is excellent as an American Jewish psychiatrist who analyzes the Nazis on trial.

The movie takes some historical liberties, sure, but it never pretends to be a definitive document. It’s an expressive sketch of events, and compelling enough to make you want to know more about the trial.

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