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Post by bravomailer on May 2, 2018 0:57:25 GMT
Montgomery Clift and Macmillan Schell give outstanding performances. The film gives a surprisingly complicated look at the Nazi sterilization program. There's a remarkable scene where Schell, the defense attorney, reads a statement justifying sterilization as benefiting society. He then asks, rather bombastically, if anyone knows who wrote the statement. In the context we suspect it was Göbbels, Himmler, or Hitler himself. Schell tell the court that words were written by US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v Bell. Yeah, that they did this in 1961 is all the more impressive. As I recall the trial is presented in the context of the Cold War, with the implication that the Germans shouldn't be dealt with too harshly as they were now allies against the Soviet Union.
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