Inherit the Wind - 1960

Inherit the Wind (1960) pits Fredric March versus Spencer Tracy, and fundamentalist religion versus science, but at its core is the premise that knowledge should not be repressed because the religious right is uncomfortable with it.

This is obviously a timely message for our present era, but the script was based on the 1955 play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, whose message was more about the repression of McCarthyism than creationism, who used the famous standoff of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to reflect on not only the right of free speech, but of the very right to think for oneself.

“An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral,” goes one line in this strong, literate script.

As regards the battle between Mr. March and Mr. Tracy as actors, it is a pleasure to see two old lions with juicy character parts to play.  Since much of the story takes place in a courtroom, which is inherently dramatic, this gives them a notable setting to joust. 

Spencer Tracy, of course, was famous for stealing a scene just by standing still, but Fredric March stretches even his usual strong screen presence by unrepentant scenery chewing in this movie.  At times, it appears to render his character somewhat cartoonish, but then, we know that bombastic men who enjoy public notoriety can sometimes appear cartoonish.

Directed by Stanley Kramer, the film is rich in atmosphere with the setting of a small Southern town almost lyric in its storytelling.  I love the slow-moving camera that glides around characters in a scene without sharp, abrupt cuts. 

We begin with the tick-tock of the clock on the courthouse, and the march of a sheriff, joined by others including a minister, to the jailhouse to retrieve the prisoner for his trial.  There is no one else on the streets, and its almost like a “high noon” showdown in a western.

There is no desperado in the jail, however, just young Dick York, a high school science teacher who has taught his class about evolution from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man. We will soon see that it is something of a show trial rather than a criminal indictment; the creationists have enticed a nationally known public speaker to prosecute the case, and an equally nationally known lawyer arrives to defend Dick York. 

York plays his role with sensitivity and nuance, he was really a fine actor before his more well-known gig as Darrin Stevens in the TV show, Bewitched. His character is overwhelmed by the attention, pained over the separation from his fiancée, who is not sure his crusade is either wise or necessary, and ultimately he takes a principled stand because of the trauma inflicted on the parents of a student by fundamentalist insensitivity over their son’s tragic death.

Gene Kelly plays a smart-aleck reporter, whose newspaper has provided the services of Spencer Tracy as a means to showcase the event and sell papers. 

Florence Eldridge, the real-life wife of Fredric March, plays his wife here.  This was the final of several films she made with her husband. We last saw her play his longsuffering wife here in Another Part of the Forest (1948).  She is not so longsuffering in Inherit the Wind, but she does have a lot to contend with keeping her larger-than-life husband supported with her understanding, fried chicken, and occasional admonishments to keep him in line.

The characters played by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Gene Kelly, and Dick York are, of course, all based on real-life people.  They are given fictional names here, perhaps to keep the story more of a parable than a documentary.  The real figures are William Jennings Bryan, who like his fictional counterpart played by March is a three-time unsuccessful candidate for president, was a Secretary of State under President Wilson, and a noted orator whose “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 pushing for keeping the U.S. off the gold standard monetary system made him a giant of nineteenth-century American politics. He, like his fictional counterpart, also supported women’s right to vote, which makes him a fascinating contradiction.

Spencer Tracy’s character is based on Clarence Darrow, eminent attorney and one-time supporter of William Jennings Bryan in his presidential campaigns.  It also seems like an abrupt contradiction when Tracy and March meet at the local hotel and we think the fireworks will start, but they greet each other as old friends. 

First, Tracy greets Florence Eldridge warmly; they are old friends, too.  We are set up to understand that though the citizens of this small town who clamor at the courthouse and burn Dick York in effigy are hot under the collar at feeling their religious beliefs are threatened, the fight between the two old gladiators is an intellectual sparring of mutual respect. 

Gene Kelly’s character is based on the acerbic journalist H.L. Menken, himself a bundle of contradictions who enjoyed tearing down pomposity, but was himself an elitist, who was not a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The so-called Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a blistering hot week of July 1925.  Here in the movie, a local funeral parlor passes out fans with their advertising to the people in the courtroom.  Later in the film, the two combatant counsels get permission to peel off their suit coats. (In the real trial, the proceedings were finally allowed to take place outdoors due to the awful heat in the courtroom.)

Because the teaching of evolution is taken as a blasphemy by creationists who take the Bible as literal, and is illegal in Tennessee, the story quickly becomes, as it did in 1925, a fight to preserve religious teaching from being pushed aside in relevance by scientific thought.  We begin the story, as the men march to from the courthouse, one of them wearing a clerical collar, we hear an acapella rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.”  It sung as a slow, stately dirge by Leslie Uggams.  This is just a voiceover, however.  We do not see her, nor do we see any people of color in this movie.  Another interesting contradiction.

This is a somber moment, and though the quiet streets of this small town will soon be filled with street vendors selling souvenirs and hot dogs, and an actual carnival with a Ferris Wheel, the intent at the outset in this community is to keep their dignity and pride.

In the courtroom, Mr. Tracy and Mr. March, both of nimble minds despite their tired bodies, hash out not so much the Constitutional ideas of separation of church and state, or the First Amendment, but rather confine themselves almost entirely to biblical logic and illogic. 

Mr. March states with authority that the world began in 4,004 B.C. on October 4^th at 9:00 a.m., and Mr. Tracy after some thrust and parry, gets Mr. March to admit that the day at the time of creation might not have been a precise 24 hours.  One day might have lasted years, or eons.

This is the crux of the courtroom battle, for Tracy’s expert witnesses, all representing scientific disciplines, are disallowed by the judge, played by Harry Morgan.  To build his case, Tracy must rely on putting Mr. March on the stand instead and using Mr. March’s formidable knowledge of the Bible to turn the tables on him. 

Because they are old colleagues and know each other well, the twists and turns of their minds is like playing chess with a familiar opponent.

Fredric March, rather than protest, actually enjoys being put on the stand because he is something of a grandstander, who clearly directs his remarks not to the jury, and not to Mr. Tracy, but rather to the crowd in packed seats in the courthouse, and the new-fangled radio microphone in court.  He loves an audience.

This is where March does most of his mugging and scenery chewing, but how close this came to the real William Jennings Bryan, I really don’t know.  He is, at least in the film, an example of a highly intelligent man who enjoys an argument, but with God on his side, anyone who opposes him must be morally deficient.  The townspeople, already disposed to find fault with Dick York’s teaching evolution in his science class to their teenagers, is gleeful to see his lawyer marked as a heretic. 

At one point, we see Fredric March, along with his wife, show great compassion and concern for Dick York’s fiancée, played by Donna Anderson.  She is troubled by the trial, especially since her father is actually the minister, played by Claude Akins.  He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and in one scene, when he prays to a photo of his deceased wife in his daughter’s presence, begging his wife not to condemn their daughter for loving and defending a heretic schoolteacher, from falling from the way of grace, and we see he is unfeeling, cold, manipulative, and arrogant.  When she seeks guidance in the matter from March, he is kind and we see another side of the famous grandstander.

However, in confidence, she has told him that Dick York left the church.  A student of his drowned two years previously, a 13-year-old boy, and Preacher Claude Akins said the boy was damned because he had not been baptized.  This infuriates Dick York, and pains the boy's parents, who are in the courtroom.  His father is played by Noah Beery.

March gets her on the stand and twists her words to break her, until his wife, Florence Eldridge, from the gallery, shouts his name to stop.  Is he trying to get the fiancée to repent of loving Dick York and shame her as her father tried to earlier, or does he just really want to win this case?  Is it his religious zeal or his competitiveness that turns him to cruelty?

Beyond the scenery chewing, the other aspects of March’s portrayal I find distracting is his heavy makeup and obvious skull cap to replicate William Jennings Bryan’s baldness.

Spencer Tracy manages to mock Fredric March enough to the point where even the devout gallery snickers at March and applauds Tracy, and that evening when March and Florence Eldridge retire to their hotel room, he is an exhausted and frustrated man, hurt at being laughed at in court.  We wonder if he is emotionally stable.

At the end of the trial, his character collapses in court from the heat and dies, as did the real William Jennings Bryan (though some weeks after the trial was over).  In the next scene, when Tracy is quietly packing his briefcase in court, and Gene Kelly snidely congratulates him and triumphs over the theatrical ending of Fredric March, Tracy pays tribute to March.  He calls him a great man. 

Mr. Kelly teases Tracy, and they have a brief war of words, and Kelly learns and delights in the contradictions he has discovered in Tracy.

All the three principal men in this story have their contradictions, and we leave it to Florence Eldridge’s summation when Donna Anderson confronts her about her husband’s cruel fanaticism:  “My husband is neither a saint nor a devil, and he makes mistakes…if he’s been wrong, at least he stands for something.”

Gene Kelly stands for nothing, he’s only here for the deliciously cynical mocking.  As Tracy says to him, “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”

One of Kelly’s lines I love: “It’s a newspaperman’s duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

As Tracy leaves the courtroom, we hear Leslie Uggams’ lovely voice again, acapella, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  It is slightly more triumphant-sounding, but still a sober reflection as a national song against the Civil War rebellion and the lauding of the Republic, but a republic that rejoices in victory as “the coming of the Lord.”  Again, another thought-provoking contradiction.  We are a nation full of them.

Inherit the Wind, (which Tracy quotes from the Bible, “he that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” Proverbs 11:29) is one of the films from that pivotal era I mentioned in this post on A Face in the Crowd (1957):  There was…

“…something noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly liberal in their message.  Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, 'Enough.  Our turn in the sun now.'”  

Inherit the Wind, which comes out of the McCarthy era, is really about free speech, including, but not only, the right to quote from other than the Bible.  As Tracy says, “It is a good book, but it is not the only book.”

I recall an incident from when I was in college, I think it was in 1980.   I had a geology class, and the professor cheerfully announced that anyone in class who may have had deep religious beliefs need not be unsettled by the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe, because it could have been God who created the Big Bang.

I was shocked by his announcement.  I had been raised to go to church and considered myself religious, yet I found nothing upsetting by learning about science.  It never occurred to me that a college professor in a very progressive state (Massachusetts) would feel the need to placate anyone about science possibly refuting their literal interpretation of the Bible.  

No one in class, as I remember, made any comment or reacted, so perhaps I was the only one surprised.  Along with church, I was also raised on the notion of separation of church and state.  

I thought he was a good teacher, and I enjoyed the class, and soon we were engrossed in talking about another Big Bang, as that was the year Mount Saint Helens erupted.  He never mentioned anything about that being in the Bible.

*******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

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Uneasy Victors PT 4 - "Judgment at Nuremberg" - 1961

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a perfect union of script, stage, and screen. In few other films is dialogue so completely depended upon to move the action, tell the back story, and dramatize the events. That this is accomplished with such graceful simplicity in this movie is its most astonishing and crowning achievement.

This is our last entry in our series on “Uneasy Victors” in which we examine Hollywood films tackling American involvement, and American mood, in Occupied Germany after World War II. Our intro to this series is here. We discuss A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and The Big Lift (1950) here.  Yesterday, we marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought our entry into World War II, and our eventual role as uneasy victors.

The startling beginning to this film serves as a metaphor for the movie and our series: the German martial tune “Wenn wir marshieren” is sung by a male chorus, of whom we might imagine to be soldiers. Then the footage showing the concrete swastika on the Nuremberg stadium being exploded to nothing.

But the regime we had defeated, and the people who lived in that world, did not vanish into nothing. They were before us now, real, alive, and carrying more baggage from the recent terrible past than most of them wanted to admit.  And we find ourselves at a sudden full stop.  The warrior's drive it took to win the war must be muted to a stateman's diplomacy.

As in the two other movies we discussed, rubble plays a big part in our discovery of Occupied Germany. Spencer Tracy’s first line in the movie, as he is being driven through Nuremberg says, “I didn’t know it was so bad.”

Spencer Tracy is a semi-retired American judge from Maine, who is assigned to head the tribunal in the Judges Trial phase of the Nuremberg Trials which served to try and punish Nazi officials. All the big names and the higher-ups have had their day in court, and this new trial before us focuses on lesser figures. They are smaller fish.

The Germans, the Europeans, and the Americans back home are growing weary of the trials and losing interest. There is something at stake, however, we come to understand, in just letting bygones be bygones. As prosecuting attorney Richard Widmark sarcastically retorts to rumblings that he should just drop the case, “What was the war all about?”

There is also a danger in proceeding with this trial. One of the accused men is a famous German judge who worked diligently for democracy in the Weimar Republic before Hitler took power. Played by Burt Lancaster with enigmatic dignity, he has a long career of distinguished and honorable work, and is a hero to his people. It will not be easy to try and convict him.

In the middle of the trial, we hear that the Russians, our allies in World War II, have blockaded Berlin in an attempt to get the allies to relinquish the capitol to their control. The Berlin Airlift is about to begin -- which takes us back to The Big Lift. We are undecided as to the wisdom of continuing to punish the Germans -- we may need them in a new war against the Soviet Union.

This movie, then, is about compromise. When do to it. When not to. What are the consequences? There are always consequences.

The ensemble cast is well chosen and effective in every minute detail, right down to Tracy’s household butler and housekeeper, played by Ben Wright and Virginia Christine. They are a husband and wife, humble, slightly nervous about pleasing “Your Honor,” because without this job they would starve. They represent the average German citizen who has lost much in the war, who are not responsible for Nazi atrocities -- but who are not entirely convinced that the atrocities are as bad as everyone says they are.

A young William Shatner plays Tracy’s aide during the trial, who swears in the witnesses. One is struck by his ease and his strong screen presence, even in playing scenes with the magnificent veteran Tracy.

Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift play victims called to give testimony. Both give the performances of their careers.

Marlene Dietrich plays a role completely opposite to the sneering cabaret singer of A Foreign Affair. Here she is an aristocrat, proud, dignified, but bitter that she and her kind should be held on the same level as Nazis.

Most especially powerful is the Oscar-winning performance of Maximillian Schell as the defense attorney. He is young, intelligent, impassioned, and desperately tries to save his hero -- Burt Lancaster, from disgrace and dishonor and a prison sentence, in any way he can.

But most evident through this film, though we do not see them, are the director, Stanley Kramer, and the writer, Abby Mann. Mann’s script was originally produced on TV in the acclaimed series Playhouse 90, which we discussed in this previous post. Playhouse 90 also gave us “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “The Miracle Worker,” and never was television so good.

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that this film is a union of script and stage, and when I say stage in this case I mean stagecraft. The Playhouse 90 version (Maximillian Schell and Werner Klemperer reprise their roles here), because of the restrictions of early television was very much like a stage play in the sense that the action was static, one set with simple camera placement.

Though there are some scenes outside the courtroom, the Director Kramer wisely chose to keep this television-style tightness to his movie. It shows up with profound effect even in the smallest scenes. There is a scene where Richard Widmark visits the apartment of Judy Garland and her husband to plead for her to testify. She is reluctant. There are many old ghosts haunting her. As Widmark and Miss Garland -- he in his officer’s uniform and she looking like a bedraggled hausfrau in her bathrobe and unkempt hair -- stand in heated discussion -- in the foreground we have her husband facing us, his back to them. We see his tortured expression. The trio is an artists’ composition for the camera.

What were restrictions on television became style in this movie, and used to extremely dramatic effect. Though most of the action takes place in the courtroom in an exchange of dialogue between the witness and the attorney, the camera is always, always moving. We slide in a slow, graceful dance around the courtroom, as the camera probes the many uniformed personnel. The translators, the guards, the gallery of observers, the stony-faced defendants, and nervous testifiers in the witness stand.

We travel 360 degrees all around the flinching expression of a confused, distressed Montgomery Clift -- who seems like a completely different man to how he appeared in The Big Lift 11 years before -- before his disfiguring car accident and years of drug and alcohol abuse. Truly, he was a different man.

We travel all around the chiseled features of Burt Lancaster, moved at last to speak though through much of the trial sits in silent protest. The stage play sets him in his witness box, delivering his lines with his precise speech, but the movie camera compliments the stagecraft and lets us get in really close to see the flashing of his haunted eyes.

It would be a good lesson for young filmmakers who these days seem to have almost uniformly adopted the quick edited, jerky camera habit to see what mature and elegant cinematography looks like.

The most magnificent CGI or special effect is not more dramatic than a slow, intimate close-up on human tears.

We see each person with a headset, all intently listening and pausing before they respond, because we do not understand each other.

There are four defendants in this trial, all German judges who are accused of crimes against humanity. Two particular cases are presented before us: one in which Montgomery Clift was forcibly sterilized in retaliation because his father was a member of the Communist Party and his family did not support Hitler, and his brothers beat up a bunch of Brownshirts harassing them.

The other case is about Judy Garland’s friendship with an elderly Jewish man, a friend of her family. When she was a girl on her own after her parents died, he continued to visit her and bring her gifts and comfort, and advice. She was sentenced to prison for breaking the law that said a German (Christian) girl could have no intimate relations with a Jewish man. Her defense was that her relations with him were not intimate, and that he was only like a kind uncle to her. The law in Germany at the time stipulated that any contact was forbidden. She was imprisoned, and the Jewish man was executed.

The judge at her trial was Burt Lancaster.

Maximillian Schell’s defense of the accused judges ranges from brutally tearing apart the witnesses’ claims, to an even more insidious tactic -- the time-worn defense of merely following orders. But both these tactics are brilliant and thrust to the heart of the American conscience -- our own uncomfortable conscience at being occupiers.

In the first instance, he demonstrates that Mr. Clift was sterilized not for political reasons, but for medical reasons. He was tested and judged to be mentally incompetent, and for this reason was required to be sterilized for the betterment of the state. Herr Schell points out a very similar stance in American law, in a judgment written by renown United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in an era when eugenics was popular.

The camera pauses to let us see this stick in the throats of Spencer Tracy and Richard Widmark.

In the case of Judy Garland, Schell breaks her down and twists her words to make her and her relationship with her elderly benefactor appear dirty. At this point, we watch Schell raging, barking in profile, while behind him in the shot, an outraged Burt Lancaster can take no more. He jumps to his feet and with all his authority, silences the young protégé with rebuke.

We have already been clued into Lancaster’s moral righteousness. Schell has outlined his exemplary judiciary career. But we get a personal, dramatic taste from Marlene Dietrich.

Spencer Tracy discovers that the mansion in which the U.S. Army has billeted him during this trial was confiscated from Dietrich, the wife of a German general who was previously tried and executed. Having usurped her home, Mr. Tracy feels most intimately the role of the Uneasy Victor.

“There’s one thing about Americans,” Widmark bitterly remarks, “We’re not cut out to be occupiers. We’re new at it, and we’re not very good at it.”

Tracy and Marlene meet socially, and he is intrigued with her soignée class and intelligence. She is an aristocrat, the daughter and the wife of career military men. She invites him to a concert, proud to show another side, a cultured, genteel side of German life. Over the strains of Beethoven, Spencer Tracy looks around at the audience, wondering what is in the hearts and minds of these conquered people so bravely looking beyond their recent past to a future swept clean…by what?

Tracy is a kind of Mark Twain/Abraham Lincoln character in this movie, small town American, homespun horse sense, self deprecating, and a willingness to keep an open mind. When he meets Marlene in a charming tavern -- again, for the third time in this series we are taken out to the cabaret -- she tries harder to impress upon him the respectability of the German people, despite what their own political monsters have done to them.

To this end, she tells a story about Burt Lancaster, who in a social gathering, discovering a smarmy Hitler flirting with his wife, bravely and with disgust bestows upon The Little Corporal a rebuke no less severe than he has given to Maximillian Schell in the courtroom, and no less public.

Marlene then catapults the conversation to the ultimate question at hand and the thing that Tracy really wants to know: Do you really think we knew about the concentration camps and the murder of millions? We didn’t know.

In court, Richard Widmark has finally shown the footage of the concentration camps and what Allied soldiers, like himself, found there when they marched in and liberated them. Widmark, in his crisp, carefully enunciated speech (they had voices then) narrates the movie.

“How DARE they show us those films!” Werner Klemperer, one of the defendants shrieks.

In the tavern, we hear the soft tenor singing, “Du, du liegst mir in Herzen....”

The judges had to make their rulings based upon the laws they were given, which was based on the political influence at the time.

American judges are also influenced by politics, we see, as Tracy’s fellow judge, Ray Teal insists they must be lenient on the Germans because the Soviets are worse. He calls prosecutor Widmark “a radical” and a “protégé of FDR.” Conservatives hated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, vilified him, and their political progeny continue to do the same. Ray Teal wants to know where Tracy stands.

“I’m a rock-ribbed Republican who thought Franklin Roosevelt was a great man.”

“Oh. One of those.”

Marlene sings a verse of “Lili Marleen” as Tracy walks her home, past the ruins, to her apartment. It is not as dilapidated as her flat in A Foreign Affair, but we can see the shabbiness in the boarded-up windows, where the elegant coffee set seems to cast a refulgent glow, a reminder of the genteel past in a post-War room. Her husband’s distinguished portrait is displayed in pride of place.

“We did not know!” She insists.

Tracy, struggling with his uncertainty replies, “As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.”

She tells him, “We have to forget if we are to go on living.”

It has been reported that Marlene hated doing this scene, to play the spokeswoman for a regime she personally hated, to the point where it made her physically ill.

“As a German, I feel ashamed that such things could have taken place in my country,” Maximillian Schell, barely containing his anger responds, “But I do think it was wrong, indecent, and terribly unfair of the prosecutor to show such things….”

He pleads with Lancaster to keep silent and not take the stand, “We have to look to the future. We can’t turn back now. Do you want the Americans to stay here forever?” Besides, he says, the Americans do not have the right to judge them, and brings up Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“Is that their superior morality?”

In court, Schell expertly shifts the blame for these trials from Lancaster to the world at large, who let Hitler have his way for so long.

Burt takes the stand and explains in passionate shame how a man, and a country, could use love of country as an excuse to deny rights to the individual. He is the picture of dignified self-loathing, near tears. He describes himself as a man “worse than all of them because he knew what they were and went along with them…made his life excrement because he worked with them.”

Wanting to explain personally to Tracy about the millions who were persecuted, Lancaster tells him, “I never knew it would come to that.”

Tracy replies, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

The German judges are all found guilty, and as Tracy departs the prison after his final visit with Lancaster, we hear the strains of “Wenn wir marschieren” once more, and the silent caption telling us that now, in 1961 at the time this film was made, not one single person imprisoned during the Nuremberg Trials was still serving his sentence. They had all been freed.

Another political compromise?

It’s a cynical ending to an earnest film with a passionate message. The movie had its world premiere in Berlin on December 14, 1961 -- West Berlin now, as four months before, the German Democratic Republic built the Berlin Wall. Doubtless, the audience considered that and may have been distracted by current events from this magnificent movie. Did current events render the film obsolete and irrelevant?

We’ll close this series by giving Marlene Dietrich the last word. In 1960, before this film was made, she took her cabaret act to Berlin for the first time, where she was greeted with a pained mixture of welcome, and furor by those who still resented her for “betraying” her homeland. After this movie came out, she took her act to Israel, which welcomed her as a celebrity who was well known to be anti-Nazi.

However, Marlene was advised not to sing any songs in German, as that language was taboo there at the time. Marlene broke the taboo and sang in German, and was cheered, especially for the song shown below (though this footage is from a later European concert). It is “Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind.” You will recognize it as Pete Seeger’s, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?”

We may smile at her limited vocal range, and at her studied showmanship, but there is something wonderfully transcendent in this German rendition of an American anti-war song. Especially when it is sung by this German actress.  This American actress.