NUREMBERG is the latest of a handful of feature films and mini-series that have looked at the historic 1945-46 trials that took leading figures of the Hitlerian hierarchy to docket & noose for crimes against humanity before & during the Second World War. Despite a mesmerizing portrayal of 53-year-old Nazi pig #2 Hermann Goering by Russell Crowe (61, a quarter century and 100 pounds away from Gladiator), much of the rest of the 2025 movie, though well-intended and tragically timely, too often comes across as another example of H.F.P.W.D.K.A—History For People Who Don’t Know Any.

1945. World War Two is over, and the victorious Allies place high-ranking Nazis—military and civilian—on trial for their atrocities. Taking a leave of absence from the Supreme Court, highly respected Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) is the chief U.S. Counsel for the prosecution. As he helps organize the range and goals of the event, one of those working at a lower echelon is US Army Major Douglas Kelley (Rami Makek, 33), tasked with interviewing defendants, chiefly focusing on cagey, smugly unrepentant Reichsmarschall Goering. As Kelley attempts to figure out his patient/specimen—Goering’s aura of command holds sway over the others whose fate is on the line and whose necks will hopefully be stretched—the wily Hermann gets a read on the fascinated Douglas; an odd sort of bond seems to form between the two.

Done for a relatively bargain basement cost (between seven and ten million dollars), this look at the clash of situation, characters, time period and settings was written & directed by James Vanderbilt, who did a stellar job on the script for another real-life horror story, Zodiac. Yet the skill he brought to that 2007 chiller, set in the California Bay Area of the late 1960’s, doesn’t transfer over to a convincing reckoning with the 1930’s-40’s reign of terror enacted on a cosmic scale.

Though based on Jack El-Hai’s well-received book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist”, Vanderbilt’s script, while boasting its share of well-delivered moments, ultimately comes across as an exercise in mechanical construction. Whether it was iron-clad complete or went thru tinkering input from producers (fifty-one * besides Vanderbilt) and/or some of the stars, scene-after-scene is marked with dialogue ‘beats’, fit for use in advertising trailers or to prod audiences either dulled down over years of exposition simplification between commercials and minus any real sense of background sensitivity: is history taught at all anymore? Colonels tell majors and captains who Goering is—something any five-year old from Appalachia to Antarctica knew in 1939, let alone 1945. Inaccuracy and invention are rife and ripe. Though the show deserves credit for bringing the event to the attention of a new generation, for older (or at least more discerning) viewers, the flaws undercut the impact. The normally dynamic (and always unusual) Michael Shannon is muted, noticeably less arresting than his norm, and the offbeat and likable Malek feels like an anachronistic cutout: contrast this over-hyped period character with his spot-on WW2 Marine in the mini-series The Pacific.

In the degenerates roll call, there is good work from Dieter Reisel as Julius Streicher and Tom Keune as Robert Ley. Top of his game and running the table on focused intensity, Crowe is simply outstanding; his galvanizing, minutely etched performance as a jovial and confident monster alone makes the always interesting yet repeatedly frustrating show worth seeing. **

KELLEY: “There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today.”   RADIO SHOW MODERATOR: “Not in America.”   KELLEY: “Yes, in America. Their personality patterns are not obscure. There are people who want to be in power. And while you say they don’t exist here, I would say I’m quite certain there are people in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they knew they could gain control of the other half. They stoke hatred. It’s what Hitler and Göering did, and it is textbook. And if you think the next time it happens we’re going to recognize it because they’re wearing scary uniforms, you’re out of your damn mind.”

The worldwide theatrical gross tallied $56,900,000, just a quarter of that in the US, where it placed 90th at the box office. Trying to calculate the further revenue from streaming services is a task beyond my ensign’s grade.

148 minutes, with Leo Woodall (as Sgt. Howie Triest, interpreter), John Slattery (as Col. Burton Andrus, commander of the Nuremberg prison), Richard E. Grant (quietly effective as British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe), Colin Hanks (as psychologist Gustave Gilbert), and Andreas Pietschmann (as self-entrapped killer rabbit Rudolf Hess).

Give me a break and a half

* “Produce Dept. call on lines 1 thru 52”— Vanderbilt and eight others are given credit as “producer”. There were fifteen co-producers, twelve executive producers, eight associate producers, seven co-executive producers, and one line producer. Who got the coffee?

** Putre-fact-shun—fidelity casualties start early and accumulate. Why insert a hot, aggressively flirtatious, totally fictional lady reporter (played by Lydia Peckham, 29, looking and behaving like someone from 2025 instead of 1945) to tease Kelley? Nothing against the comely actress, but as written & directed it clangs the bogus bell. Shrink-fits: in reality there was zero physical altercation between colleagues Kelley and Gilbert. The pussyfoot treatment of Goering’s wife Emmy (played by Lotte Verbick) and daughter Edda (done by Fleur Bremmer) is outlandishly wrong: the performers are fine, but the script grants unwarranted sympathy—Emmy was a Reich-witch of the highest order and the ‘darling’ kleine grew up to be a Nazi-nostalgic adult who was unreserved in her lifelong admiration for her father. The inclusion of Triest, German refugee-turned US soldier—is true, but someone told actor Woodall not to bother with the slightest trace of accent, he sounds more American than Gary Cooper. Though Fyfe gets hero treatment for his famous grill-down of Goering, it ought be of interest to many that later, as Britain’s Home Secretary, he led the campaign to scourge England of male homosexuals, wrecking thousands of lives in the ‘purification’ process. The silent treatment gets a hidden cameo: no mention is made of the trials of Imperial Japan’s war criminals, which ran from 1946 until 1951. We can always depend on Hollywood and company to keep  20th century Germany and the Nazis on yearly tap for villainy (hard to deny unless you’re a denier) but it’s somehow considered racist to bring attention to their WW2 ally and its monumental grotesquerie on that side of the globe. Do some reading and you will discover a new appreciation of ‘outrage’.

Speaking of reading, the full title of Jack El-Hai’s 304 page book is “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fateful Meeting of Minds at End of WWII”. Kelley’s book was “22 Cells in Nuremberg: In the Nazi Mind”. There are several other tomes on the ill-fated Kelley and his repellent but fascinating encounters with individuals who helped bring about the deaths of multiple millions.

The 1961 classic Judgment At Nuremberg was an elaborate fictional take on the subject, and while it aimed to make “a statement” and get at some truth about the event, unlike the new film it didn’t lay claim to factual content: with a trifling few missteps, director Stanley Kramer, writer Abby Mann and an all-star cast delivered memorable dramatics in three hours that remain a compelling watch many years later.

Achtung! Anyone paying a gnat’s worth of attention knows that while those old Nazis are kaput, there is at present a risen phoenix (make that a ferocious pterodactyl) of endless fear and bottomless hatred in our homeland-spawned, Rapture-ready supply of brutes, fools, weasels and killer clowns. Lacking the twisted flair of the fascists they emulate, let alone the courage, intellect, dignity and guts of those they target, these vampires spew their filth in $1,000 suits instead of uniforms. Add a made-in-USA bonus: access to toys Hitler could only dream of. Last time around, sleepwalking mankind was lucky, the toll a mere 70-85,000,000 dead. But, like rules, laws, spirits and societies, World Records are there to be broken. “Next week…on Survivor!”

If the Crowe fits, share it—can the sermon, let’s end on a positive: Romper Stomper, L.A. Confidential, The Insider, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World, Cinderella Man, American Gangster, Robin Hood, The Nice Guys, The Loudest Voice.