Trivia / Judgment at Nuremberg

• All-Star Cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and William Shatner.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Montgomery Clift was originally offered the part of Colonel Tad Lawson, but was more interested in the smaller role of Rudolph Peterson. Burt Lancaster was offered the role as well.
• Doing It for the Art: Most of the actors involved did the movie for a fraction of their salary because they believed in the importance of the subject matter.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Montgomery Clift had a hard time remembering his lines, so Stanley Kramer allowed him to ad-lib, which ended up adding to the frailty of the character. He was also in poor health due to his injuries from a 1955 car accident, plus some alcohol and drug abuse afterward. The performance was not however just confused improvisation; as revealed in a 2018 documentary by his nephew Robert Anderson Clift, he had just rewritten his own dialogue, and the anguished performance was a deliberate choice.
  • Inverted in another case. Judy Garland was so happy to be in the film, after seven years away, that it took her a while to get into the proper frame of mind for a crying scene.
• Fake Nationality: Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, and Burt Lancaster play Germans.
• Jews Playing Nazis: Emil Hahn, the most viciously unrepentant Nazi ideologue among the defendants, was played by Werner Klemperer, whose Jewish family fled Germany shortly before the Nazis' rise to power.
• Looping Lines: Much of Marlene Dietrich's dialogue had to be post-dubbed, purportedly because her voice was too low and thin for sync sound recording.
• One-Take Wonder: Spencer Tracy's eleven-minute closing speech was filmed in one take.
• Playing Against Type: Marlene Dietrich, who in real life was passionately anti-Nazi, plays a character who claims the Germans didn't know the full extent of what they'd done. Dietrich reportedly found scenes where she espoused that viewpoint hard to film.
• Production Posse: This is the second of four films Stanley Kramer and Spencer Tracy made together.
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Montgomery Clift had a habit of cutting his hair very short between films, and usually wouldn't work until it grew back. He was approached to do his scene right after getting one of these haircuts, which is why it's shorter than normal.
• Star-Making Role: For Maximilian Schell, who'd only done a few German films and a bit part in The Young Lions previously.
• Wag the Director:
  • Perhaps fearing he wouldn't be able to perform some of Mann's longer passages of dialogue, Montgomery Clift asked Stanley Kramer if he could change some of the dialogue where necessary. Kramer told him he could have a certain amount of flexibility.
  • Marlene Dietrich was reluctant to play her role until every detail was ironed out to her satisfaction. She insisted her frequent designer Jean Louis create all her clothes. Dietrich also had Kramer alter the painting of the man who was supposed to be her dead military officer husband because she didn't think he looked dignified enough. Each day she would march onto the set and immediately give orders about how she was to be lighted and where the camera should be placed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Marlon Brando was very interested in the part of Rolfe, and Kramer was interested in using him, but when he saw Schell's performance in the original TV version, Kramer and writer Abby Mann decided on using Schell instead.
  • Laurence Olivier was originally cast as Ernst Janning.
  • Kramer originally wanted Julie Harris for Irene Hoffmann.
  • Having worked well with him on The Defiant Ones, Kramer was keen to work with Tony Curtis again but the actor's schedule didn't allow for it.

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