In the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, many people in America have called into question the position of the cinema in national culture. Multiple sources in the media have commented that movies are unimportant during such times, and the delay of multiple film release dates brings the underlying query of an entertainment-fed republic to light: what purpose, if any, does the motion picture art form serve in times of calamity?

Despite the shabby gamut of contemporary films that flaunt dazzling special effects and larger-than-life relationships, the film industry, and even Hollywood, should not be absolutely damned as "immoral," "desensitizing" or "intrinsically worthless." A few films continue to illuminate the better possibilities of which the cinema is capable, movies that offer lasting value and introspection, even in the darkest hours of human relations. One such film is Stanley Kramer's 1961 drama "Judgment at Nuremberg".

Modeled on Abby Mann's Academy Award winning screenplay, "Nuremberg" depicts the 1949 trial of four German judges who are charged with multiple crimes against humanity, including human sterilization, political oppression and systematic murder.

Thespian icon Spencer Tracy, who had starred previously in Kramer's provocative film "Inherit the Wind" and who would later team with him in 1965 for the zany "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," brings dogged severity to the role of Judge Dan Haywood, the pivotal justice in the trial.

Besides having a penchant for working with Tracy, Kramer also had a knack for landing all-star casts: Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift all reel off career performances.

However, German actor Maximilian Schell impresses most in the seemingly one-dimensional role of the defense counsel, which garnered him the Oscar for Best Actor.

Filmed in a sobering monochrome, "Nuremberg's" opening scenes feature actual footage of what was left of the city that once hosted the pomp and panoply of the Third Reich: decaying buildings, naked poverty and a guilt-ridden populace. The latter is made evident early in the trial, as Hans Rolfe (Schell) states in his opening remarks, "It is not only [the defendants] who are on trial, but the entire German people!"

Though the idea of collective guilt is a peripheral concept in the courtroom, as the narrative follows Haywood's daily encounters with German men and women, it becomes evident that Kramer is documenting some sort of mass evasion of responsibility employed by those who lived in Nazi Germany. However, Rolfe extricates himself from this guilt by operating under a nationalist, albeit noble, ethos: "I want to leave the German people something."

Rolfe's success in the courtroom depends upon rendering a particular defendant, Ernst Janning (Lancaster), guiltless. Janning, whose reputation for justice and morality stood for a virtuous Germany, becomes the principal figure in the trial. Rolfe strives to prove his innocence, the prosecution strains to reveal his guilt, and Haywood struggles to understand his enigmatic motives.

Though the prosecuting attorney Colonel Lawson (Widmark) seems to have files upon files of ostensibly dooming evidence against the four judges, Rolfe foils Lawson's attacks not by outright refutation, but by twisting witness subjectivity in such a way as to make the actions of the four judges plausible.

Under Kramer's masterful direction, Rudolph Petersen (Clift), who was sterilized under Nazi law because of his communist father, gives the first of three gripping witness interviews.

Lawson unremittingly bears down on his own witness, utilizing his personal adamancy and Petersen's testimony to magnify the atrocity of depriving a human being of sexual function. However, Rolfe reminds the court that Germany was not the first country to proscribe sterilization: the State of Virginia legalized sterilization of "imbeciles and the feeble-minded." Once this point is made, Rolfe preys upon the unstable Petersen, revealing a crippling mental illness. The resulting debacle is one of the most pathetic and disturbing scenes in film history.

The final testimony is delivered by Janning himself. Tacit and blank for the most of the movie, Janning unleashes a veritable torrent of self-damning diatribe that is chilling. Completely obliterating the notion that he, those in judicial power, and the entire German people were ignorant of the legal monstrosities and death camps incurred by the Nazi party, Janning grimaces, "We didn't know the details, but it was because we didn't want to know." The portrait of Janning's self-torture, captured hauntingly in the entirety of his brilliant monologue, is a simile for the national guilt expressed by the German people.

Though the interaction between the judge, counsel and witness is stirring, the turning point of the trial comes when the films from the concentration camps are projected in the courtroom. Originally shot by the Allied forces that liberated Dachau and other camps, these films arrest the entire flow of the movie. The footage of the innumerable dead, unburied and desecrated, is treated by Kramer with reverence and integrity. Yet the sequence is without a doubt the most powerful in the film, perhaps because of the sheer nakedness of evil universally recognized by all those who see it.

Kramer highlights Schell's forceful and charismatic delivery as some of the most powerful lines in the entire film, pointing to an underlying message in his character: Rolfe admits that the entire German people are on trial, yet reminds the court that some of the same ideologies that paved the way for the Third Reich were embraced wholeheartedly by Virginia State law, which in turn incriminates the United States. He points out that before the Nazi party invaded the Sudetenland, they stopped widespread impoverishment and united a nation, and that before Hitler murdered millions of men, women and children, he built the autobahn and created jobs throughout the state.

Rolfe illustrates how the partial good of Nazism filled the vision of the people of Germany, and blotted out any of the darker aspects that a wider perspective might have had.

The script's description of early Nazi Germany is eerily similar to that of America, and expresses how human beings, regardless of nation, are prone to evil when they fail to maintain an objective, historical viewpoint upon meeting hard times.

As America regroups, movies such as "Nuremberg" offer a warning that the citizens of a nation should never compromise basic morals for the sake of the collective good. Janning's final statement is strangely pertinent: "Our democracy was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us." -- Video Pick of the Week.

Contact Mario Bird at mbird@nd.edu.

• Real fear, real life
  
• `Nuremberg' is morally relevant even today
  
• DeNiro's `Bull' only fights himself