I love TCM. In the past week they’ve had some Spencer Tracy movies, and the two I watched were Judgment at Nurmeberg and Pat & Mike. There’s something about Tracy, a kind of magnetism that he has that has hardly anything to do with his lumpy looks. He’s a mensch. He’s the Walter Cronkite of film stars–the trustworthy, down-to-earth uncle to whom you turn when nobody else will give you a break. The guy who understands human frailty, and how everyone plays the angles, and is looking out for number one, but who also stands for a decency that the pressures of life might bend but can never break.
Pat & Mike–the seventh of the nine movies Tracy and Hepburn made together–was Hepburn’s favorite of the nine, and I can see why. While the plot is silly, the dialog, particularly for Tracy’s part, was cleverly written and the chemistry between them is just so comfortable. You can see why the high-strung Hepburn would find a “home” with Tracy. He’s the kind of guy that is so at home with himself he creates a home for everyone who is around him. He’s like a big tree in which all kinds of birds make their nests.
In Judgment at Nuremberg he plays Judge Dan Haywood, a rock-ribbed republican who admires FDR–a film cliche indicator that he is an open-minded, non-ideological, independent thinker. He wants to understand the Germans–he’s genuinely interested if puzzled and appalled. He’s not a fanatic like the prosecutor, who sees all Germans as guilty and who is relentless in pursuing and humiliating the guilty. But he’s not someone swayed by the growing conventional wisdom about dealing expediently with important political figures–in this case German judges who sent so many to their deaths in the camps–and which counsels forgive and forget, and moving on.
Because that’s the argument of the defense: If these people are guilty, everybody is. The situation for everyone except the architects of these policies is much too morally ambiguous for anyone to make self-righteous judgments. Nobody knew what was going on in the camps–not even these important judges. These defendants were just doing their jobs–following the law as it was their duty to do. The movie makes a pretty strong case that holding war criminals responsible for their crimes is a luxury that could not be afforded in a time of crisis. And this movie came out in 1961 when people were feeling cold war heat pretty intensely. A thousand and one excuses are offered to defend the indefensible to suggest that there were good reasons for doing the wrong thing. It’s always the same with those who embrace this kind of expedient conventional wisdom. They think they’re the moderates, the ones who are smart and sophisticated about the way the world really works, and they contrast themselves with those who demand accountability whom they see as naive or fanatic.
That’s what makes Tracy’s delivery of the verdict so moving. He’s listened to every argument by the so-called moderates for expediency, but he will not submit to their conventional thinking. Instead he delivers this speech:
This movie is interesting for making what most of us from the position of forty-five years later think of as a slam-dunk verdict appear much less so at the time. This a movie that makes a very sympathetic case for some of the decent Germans who were swept along by the Nazi machine. It poses questions to us in the audience about whether we would have done any better in resisting the pressures to be swept along if we were in their situations. The verdict of history is clear, but it’s not ever unambiguously clear when you are in the historic situation. The same is true for us now in America in 2010.
And I think Judge Haywood’s speech is rhetorically powerful because Spencer Tracy delivers it. If it were some raging fire-eater it wouldn’t have the same effect. It’s a restrained but powerful defense of common decency and what common decency demands in a situation when many were making the case to Haywood that “You can’t litigate policy differences.”
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In Pat & Mike, Tracy plays the Runyonesque sports promoter, Mike Conovan, who’s interested in the the ladies golf and tennis phenom, Hepburn’s Pat Pemberton. In their first meeting he asks her to throw the golf match that he felt sure she would win. She won’t do it, of course, and later he asks his colleague how many people out of a hundred he thinks are honest, and he says “Two.” Mike disagrees and says it’s three, and too bad Pat wasn’t one of the ninety seven.
I’m beginning to wonder if he’s right. I mean of course nobody’s completely dishonest, and nobody’s completely honest, simul justus et peccator and all that, but maybe when it comes down to the hard choice, a choice that requires one to pay a price for his decency, only three out 100 will do it. Or maybe it’s that when any of us is confronted with the choice that will cost us, we will make the hard choice only three out of one hundred times.
Was it unfair that Ernst Janning, the most complex and sympathetically drawn of the defendants in Judgment at Nuremberg, was condemned for the few bad decisions he made even though he made so many good ones? Or is really the question not one of quantity but quality. Some decisions count more than others, and so it works the other way as well. Maybe 97 or even 99 times out of a hundred you make the wrong choice, you go along with the conventional wisdom, but then there’s that one time you don’t, and that makes all the difference.
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