This proved the impossible sell. And Judy Garland was no help. The star was well past her best and if she wasn’t singing it was difficult to attract audience interest. So beyond her name above the title, United Artists did very ittle to use her presence as a distinct marketing tool.
Just like I Thank a Fool the previous year, the subject matter of A Child is Waiting did not lend itself to cross promotion. That did not prevent marketeers doing their level best. However, it was a rather bold suggestion to assume banks would be a natural port of call even under the guise that every child was waiting for their parents to start a savings account to see them through college.
The title seemed to incite temporary madness in the marketing department. How about this for a tie-in approach to a toy department? “A child is waiting for the most exciting game ever devised – Monopoly.”
Groups most likely to respond were identified as psychiatrists, teachers and PTA members but cinemas were warned to avoid giving the “impression that the film is a clinical or documentary one.”
By far the easiest avenue for promotion was a book tie-in. Popular Library had issued a paperback novelization by Abby Mann of his original screenplay with stars Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland on the cover and at the very least that would receive window displays in bookstores and on the carousels of drugstores.
Also limited were the number of taglines on a poster. In those days a movie could be advertised with as many as a dozen different taglines appealing to different market sectors. United Artists stuck to three main taglines with two subsidiary ones. Sometimes both subsidiaries were on the same poster, other times only one.
“Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland ignite a motion picture that gives so much…goes so far…looks so deep into the feelings of man and woman.” This alternated with “Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland take an untouched theme – and make it touching and unforgettable” and “Only Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland could take this untold story…and make your heart tell it over and over again.”
The subsidiary taglines ran to: “If this were flesh of your flesh – would you hold it close…Protect it…Love it…Or would you turn your back and run” and “A child can be so many things, warmth…love…laughter…and sometimes a child can be heartbreak!”
Mainly what marketeers were asking of Lancaster and Garland was a miracle, as if their names alone could drag audiences into theaters.
Even though the Pressbook was relatively small – eight pages A3 – two-thirds of the space was allocated to repeating the adverts, just in different sizes.
The section normally aimed at getting editors to carry snippets of news about the movie provided scant material. There was little to catch the journalistic eye, nothing new about either of the stars, just a rehash of careers. Usually, cinema managers would scour this section looking for a titbit to offer to a reporter, an unusual hobby, something odd that occurred during filming, details about the location or an element that went wrong during shooting.
If you were relying on this Pressbook to fuel demand from exhibitors, you would be sorely disappointed.
While once the main interest in this piece would have come from fans of Judy Garland, lapping up her penultimate movie appearance, the prevalence of mental illness these days especially among the young, in part due to Covid and the scourge of social media, should switch audience attention – especially among contemporary viewers – back to the subject matter.
Garland’s stock had risen somewhat after her performance in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), her first movie in seven years, but, given the travails of her private life, would most likely have been sympathetic to anything that cast a light on mental illness. The bulk of movies covering this ground tended towards the lurid, as exemplified by Shock Corridor (1963) and Shock Treatment, (1964) rather than the more tragic Lilith (1962). Whatever the approach, they focused on adult conditions. Here it’s the treatment of children.
Appreciation of the social conscience of star Burt Lancaster has largely gone unnoticed but this was the era when his movies touched upon crooked evangelism (Elmer Gantry, 1960), teenage gangs (The Young Savages, 1961), the Holocaust (Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961) and the effects of long-term imprisonment (The Birdman of Alcatraz, 1962). He was even an animal rights protester in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963).
Parental attitude to offspring with mental conditions is encapsulated in the opening sequence. Outside a hospital a young boy is tempted out of an automobile. Once out, the driver (the father) races off so fast the car door is still swinging open. Mentally or emotionally disturbed children were dumped, ostracized or abandoned by society, sometimes shut up in institutions along with adults, with treatment belonging to the Dark Ages.
Drawing on the ground-breaking approach of Vineland Training School in New Jersey and the Pacific Hospital in Pomona, California (pupils from the latter played the students in the film), the movie attempts to cast a light on the forgotten and to show that, with proper care and education, they need not be such victims of their circumstances.
The movie focuses on Dr Clark (Burt Lancaster), head of the Crawthorne State Training School, whose pioneering work combines tender encouragement with firm application, and the new music teacher Jean (Judy Garland) who challenges his approach. Instigating this crisis is 12-year-old Reuben, the child we see offloaded at the start, for whom Jean develops an unhealthy bond. She thinks Dr Clark is too strict and that his methods don’t work with someone as vulnerable as Reuben. Clark’s aim is to make the children so self-sufficient they are not condemned to a life in an adult institution.
Jean’s intervention creates a crisis in the child’s life but also brings home the unwelcome truth of the difficulties parents have of dealing with their children.
And while the tale is essentially confected to make the necessary points and Dr Clark and Jean epitomize opposite attitudes to handling the treatment of children, the story is really a documentary in disguise, bringing to light advances in care, and with the children not played by actors, brings a greater reality to the work.
Burt Lancaster, as ever, is good value and Judy Garland steps up to the plate. Gena Rowlands (Machine Gun McCain, 1969) and John Marley (Istanbul Express, 1968) also feature.
While this fits neatly into Lancaster’s portfolio, it stands out for the wrong reasons in the pantheon of critically-acclaimed actor-turned-director John Cassavetes (Faces, 1968). In fact, what he produced went against what producer Stanley Kramer (better known as a director – Judgment at Nuremberg, for example) wanted and the version we see is the one Kramer recut. Written by Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg) from his original teleplay.
You might expect this to be awash with sentimentality but that’s far from the case.
Laurence Olivier could have played a Nazi long before his celebrated villainous turn in Marathon Man (1976). He was producer-director Stanley Kramer’s first choice to play Chief Judge Dr Ernst Janning. He turned the role down in favor of getting married to actress Joan Plowright. Kramer had already decided an all-star cast was required to attract an audience for the grim picture.
The screenplay was an extended version of Abby Mann’s teleplay that had screened on the ABC in 1959. Although Marty (1955) had transitioned with box office and critical success from television to cinemas, that boom was long over.
United Artists, with whom Kramer had a multi-picture deal, were not keen. “I did what looked like a compromise to them, but what I had been planning to do anyway. I promised to fill the cast with stars of such magnitude that their presence would almost guarantee the film wouldn’t lose money.”
There were a couple of other obstacles to overcome. A stage version of the teleplay was being planned for London and Paris and Kramer had to take out an injunction against a documentary with a similar title, Verdict at Nuremberg.
Kramer was known as an issues-driven director, his debut Not As a Stranger (1955) tackling the medical profession, The Defiant Ones (1958) racism and in On the Beach (1959) nuclear war. Along with Otto Preminger, he was viewed as a director of “worthy” pictures, not always a recommendation in the eyes of the critics, but as long as the movies made money and attracted Oscar interest likely to remain attractive to studios. Kramer was just about the only producer (High Noon, 1952, and The Caine Mutiny, 1954, on his calling card) who made a successful career-long transition to direction.
With the exception of Olivier, replaced with Oscar-winner Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry, 1960) – not incidentally second choice either, the director preferring to have used a German actor – Kramer hired all his first choices. Spencer Tracy, in fact, was the first recruit. After working with him on Inherit the Wind (1960), Kramer got it into his head when considering a picture to ask himself what part there might be for Tracy.
The actor provided “A depth and candor that would make people notice.” Maximilian Schell (Topkapi, 1964) reprised the role he had essayed on television, a man “living in a complicated gray zone.”
Kramer had a reputation for hiring singers and dancers – Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra – for dramatic roles and he continued in that vein by hiring Judy Garland. It was a difficult decision. He theorized that “the very disorders that made it difficult to work with her fitted perfectly with the role.”
You could have said the same of Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962), “reduced almost the level of the unsound person he was portraying.” Given the actor’s problems remembering lines, Kramer allowed Clift to basically ad lib, when attacked on the witness stand permitted to reach “for a word in the script” that appeared the correct emotional response to “convey the confusion in the character’s mind.” While Clift did not often adhere to the script, whatever he said worked well enough. Rarely has a director been so sympathetic to a troubled actor. “He needed someone to be terribly kind,” said Kramer, “someone who would consistently bolster his confidence and tell him he was wonderful.
Marlene Dietrich, who had firsthand experience of Nazi Germany at first hand, having fled the country, actually knew the general whose wife she was portraying, which helped to “deepen my understanding of the emotions of Hitler’s victims,” conceded Kramer. Opening up about her experiences and fears allowed Kramer to extend the scope of the character.
While the courtroom where the original trial had taken place was not available for hire – it was in current use – Kramer was permitted to measure and photograph the room to reconstruct it on a soundstage. Only 15 pr cent of the movie was shot in Germany.
The experience of filming Inherit the Wind, another courtroom drama, taught Kramer the need to have fluid camerawork since talk and gesture tends to be static. “I learned to move the camera often to achieve a sense of movement for the viewer.”
Abby Mann was required to open up the teleplay, move the action outside the courtroom – scenes in the judge’s accommodation, on the derelict streets, in restaurants – and avoid cinematic claustrophobia and making it a “pious sermon.” “In my opinion,” argued Kramer, “Judgment at Nuremberg conveys a moral not always honoured, then or now, in the world of politics.”
Kramer had a particular method of pre-production. He built all his sets six weeks before filming began. As part of that process, he sat down with his cinematographer and went through the script scene by scene working out the lighting and camera positions. Then he called in the actors and took them through the sets and roughly his shooting thought-process, taking on board any queries and suggestions. Film like this “sort of demanded it be shot in sequence with a single camera,” explained cinematographer Ernest Laszlo (Fantastic Voyage, 1966).
The 360-degree turning of the camera was not as revolutionary as you might imagine – although, according to critics, Michelangelo Antonioni invented it for The Passenger (1975). Laszlo had done if before on The Hitler Gang (1944) for director John Farrow. But this was infinitely more complicated set-up with the revolving camera in constant use to allow Kramer the required fluidity.
“I used two key lights,” said Laszlo. “Shooting this I used one and then as we went round I used the other.” It wasn’t as simple as it sounds, the lights needed to be positioned with mathematical precision so the audience wasn’t aware of any change in the lighting.
“The circling camera saved us photographically,” said Kramer, preventing the picture from seeming “slow and cerebral.” As smooth as it appears on screen it was cumbersome. The entire crew involved had to carry cables and equipment round in a circle. But it permitted Kramer to pick up the judges without cutting to them.
Kramer also used the camera to achieve another transition. As the picture began, German actors spoke in German (with translators offscreen) to show the trial was mostly in German. But for the movie to work, the dialog needed to be in English. “We started the transition scene with Schell addressing the court in German. Laszlo’s camera zoomed in on him, then turned elsewhere, then turned again to Schell so that we were able to switch his speech from German to English in perfect cadence as the camera came in on him the second time. His English picked up from his German so naturally you could almost let it pass without noticing.”
Kramer conceded there might, in fact, be “too much camera movement.” But that was in part dictated by a “very authentic situation, a long courtroom, very wide, and the spacing between the original attorney’s box and the witness box was at least forty feet. That’s a long distance if your try to photograph it.” Also, it wasn’t like a normal Hollywood or American trial, where the lawyers can prowl in front of judge and jury. Here, the attorneys could not move from their box.
“Unless you want to play ping-pong in the cutting room, you have to move the camera…I felt trapped by these three positions – the judges, the attorneys and the witnesses in that big spread. So, the forty feet was compressed to twenty-eight feet. We had to put a lot of light on the far figures to hold the forms in focus,” resulting in the actors “perspiring a lot during these shots.”
The movie, rolled out as a roadshow, did better than expected, the all-star cast proving a major draw, global box office netting a healthy profit. Schell won the Oscar as did Abby Mann, Kramer was nominated in his dual capacity as producer and director.
SOURCES: Stanley Kramer, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Life in Hollywood (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997) p179-197; Donald Spoto, Stanley Kramer Film Maker (Samuel French, 1990)p230-233; “An AFI Seminar with Ernest Laszlo, American Cinematographer, January 1976, p52; “Judgment at Nuremberg Still Slated for Legit,” Box Office, February 3, 1960, p6; “Kramer Gets Injunction,” Box Office, December 11, 1961, p14.
Stanley Kramer never caught a decent academic/critical break. Subject matter worthy, execution poor, was the overall consensus. But Judgement at Nuremberg, with its long tracking shots, sometimes turning 360 degrees around a character, should have changed all that. But the kind of critics who would have appreciated such bravura technique weren’t around at the time and even when Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) appeared nobody thought to reference Kramer, believing this was a new cinematic invention by the esteemed Italian maestro.
So, Judgement at Nuremberg is remembered, if at all, for the subject matter and elevated by the performances rather than the director’s input. Most people misremember what the movie’s about. The main concern here isn’t the war criminal, the men personally involved in running the ghettos. Instead, it’s about those behind the scenes who could, theoretically, have prevented the camps flourishing, or at least challenged their opening.
Those on trial were freedom fighters of a different sort. As judges, the top tier of the legal system, their job was not just to uphold law and order and individual freedoms, but to take government to task for illegal action. It’s a basic tenet of the democratic world that governments cannot act in autocratic fashion but work within public accord.
Should the legal guardians find fault with government activity, their job is to take the ruling body to task – the European Court of Human Rights was set up with exactly that principal in mind, and various British and American law agencies have over time called a halt or questioned government proposals.
Some of the judges were clearly ill-fit for the task, lick-spittle jobsworths, desperate to hold onto rank and privilege, many sharing the same anti-semitic views as Hitler. But the Allied forces, being democratic, have to proceed along proper lines, taking potential criminals to court and allowing them legal defence.
So the main target is Dr Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), German’s pre-eminent legal force, a quiet, dignified man, who refuses to fawn or react to the charges. On the attack is prosecutor Col Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark). Acting for the defence is the wily, emotional, Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) who is not above comparing the Holocaust to the Americans dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, indiscriminate terror brought on innocent civilians the result of both actions. He also brings to the court’s attention the distasteful theories that once held sway in high American legal circles as promulgated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme Court judge, whose views on eugenics aimed at withholding procreation rights from the mentally handicapped.
As referee we have Dan Heywood (Spencer Tracy), the American chief judge, who didn’t want the job and was way down the pecking order of those best qualified. And he’s a bit of a detective on the side, trying to discover how much ordinary people – such as the flirtatious Mrs Bertholdt, widow of an executed German general, as well as the housekeeper and butler looking after him in some style – knew about the atrocities as they were taking place.
In the background is an Allied command not wishing to stir up any more controversy, conscious of the rising power of the Communist bloc, seeing West Germany as a bulwark against Stalin, concerned that forcing the country’s inhabitants to wallow in the past will turn their political minds towards the east rather than the west.
In due course, a variety of witnesses are called, testifying to ill-treatment under the German government including the backward Rudolph Pedersen (Montgomery Clift) and Irene Hoffman (Judy Garland).
What makes this so different is that innocence or guilt is not what’s under scrutiny, but reason. Why did such high-minded legal experts like Dr Janning give in to Hitler. And when? And do they recognise their role in providing Hitler with credence to continue with his massacre of the Jews?
Individual conscience and, conversely, collective guilt, might have been the driving force then but they are more than relevant today when actions in war come under even greater scrutiny and politicians are held to account. Perhaps, it’s ironic how little judgement was passed in the end on those convicted in these trials. Nobody was hanged, nobody received even a life sentence. In fact, by the time the movie was released, all were free men.
Stanely Kramer, the Scorsese or Nolan of his era regarding running time (it clocks in a just shy of three hours), does a superb job with his even-handed approach. While his technical skills were perhaps under-appreciated, he certainly knows how to command an audience’s attention and draws terrific performances from his actors.
Maximilian Schell, who won the Oscar, is perceived as the standout, but for me the highpoints were Burt Lancaster (The Swimmer, 1968) and Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962). Abby Mann’s (The Detective, 1968) screenplay was an expanded version of his teleplay of two years before.
Has more than enough humanity to keep you riveted.
Behind-the-scenes books generally benefit from as much scandal as possible. Using that criteria, Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! by Stephen Rebello leaps to the top of the list. Rebello had been primarily responsible for turning Valley of the Dolls (1968) into a camp classic by hosting repeated showings of the picture from the 1990s onwards and making it number one in his book Bad Movies We Love.
The novel Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was a record-breaking bestseller on the “sex/sin/salvation literary rodeo” but nothing that came out of the fevered imagination of Harold Robbins could match the Susann book, an insider’s look at the murky goings-on in Hollywood with drug abuse at the top of the heap. Unfortunately for Susann, Twentieth Century Fox struck a deal for the film rights pre-publication, long before it became a sensation, so she earned only $85,000 upfront, a quarter of what was paid for Peyton Place which sold far fewer copies. Mark Robson who had brought Peyton Place to the big screen was hired as director.
Stars clamoring for roles included Natalie Wood, Bette Davis, Debbie Reynolds and Kim Novak. The list of those who turned it down was longer: Lee Remick, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Raquel Welch, Candice Bergen. Christopher Plummer and James Garner were screen-tested. Sharon Tate, Barbara Parkins, Judy Garland and Patty Duke won the main roles.
Movies had done away with the “any similarity” disclaimer but it was upfront in all ads for the film as well as in the pre-credits on the film, whether as a publicity ploy or to head off potential legal action is unknown.
The screenwriters were as appalled at the material as the censor. But that was just the beginning of strife central. The personal enmity between Duke and Parkins rivalled that of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Screaming matches and hissy fits abounded. Duke suffered from drug and alcohol abuse, mood swings and nervous skin conditions and constantly clashed with the director. Plus, despite cutting some singles and albums, she had to mime. Tate was forced into take after take for the normally economic director. The three young stars, believing this was a career-making picture, took no prisoners. Robson used a stopwatch when filming, as if he was already editing the film in his head, pushing the actresses to speak the lines faster, or undertake actions exactly on a time cue, a humiliating procedure in one scene for Tate. She refused to cry in case it messed up her make-up, which would cause further delay and further infuriate Robson. Tate was also embarrassed by publicity photos taken during her pornographic scene.
Garland was in no fit state to make a movie. She was drinking wine by the bucketload, dropping pills, slurring her lines, missing her cues and turning up late for work. Finally, it got too much and she was fired. Fans bombarded the studio with irate messages. Ginger Rogers rejected the role on account of the language. Robson put in a personal phone call to Susan Hayward, who had quit Hollywood, and turned down several comeback roles including Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. When Hayward was finally persuaded for a hefty fee, the producers had to shred Garland’ s costumes. They were different sizes. Hayward’s wardrobe was redesigned from scratch. The last straw on the troubled production was producer David Wiesbart dropping dead. That wasn’t quite the last straw. Critics trashed the picture. Luckily, audiences didn’t and lined up in droves.
The Magnificent 60s 