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Thoughts on Character, Courtroom Drama, and Judgement at Nuremberg

Channel 13 plays old movies every Saturday night. Yesterday they showed Judgement at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracy. The movie followed one of the post-war trials of civilian Nazi conspirators at Nuremberg, and dealt with the theme of justice in a powerful way. That in itself wouldn’t be enough to inspire me to write, but the characters in the movie create a story so intense that you can almost touch it. Then they add the accusatory question: “If you say nothing against it, are you as guilty as those who committed the deed?”

The characters are almost stock. You have the fanatic, the intelect, the sad widow, the angry prosecutor, the firey young advocate, and the wise and humble judge. Personally, I have no problem with stock characters in a story. We are all characters after all. A so-called “stock” character is simply a type of personality in a story that we immediately identify with. We have all been fanatics at one time. We have all been wise (at least in our own minds). We have all been young and passionate (or at least we wish we could be).

It’s the master storyteller who can weave these stock two-dimensional people into the fabric of the story, tangle them together with each other, and trick us into believing that they are not just representations of some aspect of our personalities, but 3D living people as real as your best friend, or your worst enemy.

The courtroom setting is one of the few ways to introduce passionate statements, emotional breakdowns, and lengthy orations into a story without seeming preachy or cheesy. Court is solemn. Court is also pageantry. Anyone who comes to court brings a question or a mystery with them; a problem begging to be solved. It’s not enough to say something is a courtroom drama. By its very nature, a courtroom is drama.

A lot of my favorite movies emphasize story, dialogue, and character. Interestingly, a lot of my favorite movies are also either older, or based on plays.