JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG TIDBITS

According to producer/director Stanley Kramer, a young New York stage actor with a small part in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961) held up production at one point. He was trying to understand his motivation in a brief shot which called for him to enter a room, cross to a table, and wait for Spencer Tracy to enter to hand him a folder. At 10:15 a.m., after sitting in his dressing room since 9:00 am, waiting to make his entrance, Tracy stormed onto the set and said, "Lookit, you come in the f***ing door and cross the f***ing room and go to the f***ing table because its the only way to get in the f***ing room. That's your motivation."

On the day Tracy gave his eleven-minute summation speech, the set at Universal Pictures was packed to the rafters with celebrities and studio executives. Kramer shot it in a single take, not because he thought breaking it up would necessarily lessen the impact of the words but because he knew he would get the maximum emotional payoff out of Tracy without having to start and stop. To be sure he had the coverage he needed without scheduling a reshoot, Kramer had the speech filmed with two cameras simultaneously from two different angles.

Montgomery Clift had difficulty with his lines, cues, and timing. He told Kramer he didn't know if he could actually get through the scene. Kramer did his best to reassure him, but it was Tracy who eventually helped Clift through it. Perhaps drawing on his own years of alcoholism, Tracy spoke to the younger actor with sympathy but with firmness, even relaxing his own dictum about sticking strictly to the script: "Just look into my eyes and do it. You're a great actor and you understand this guy. Stanley doesn't care if you throw aside the precise lines. Just do it into my eyes and you'll be magnificent." Clift spent four days getting through the seven-minute sequence, stumbling through and performing each take differently. At the end of his last take, the set broke out into spontaneous applause. "Monty's condition gave the performance an aura as though it were being shot through muslin, the way the words tumbled out and the disjointed, sudden bursts of lucidity out of a mumble," Kramer said later. "It was classic! It was one of the best moments in the film!" Some film historians and critics have since suggested that Kramer knew exactly what he was doing by casting such broken and erratic performers as Judy Garland and Clift in roles that called for expressions of pain, embarrassment, and terror...