Daniel and Jack talk about Nuremberg (2025) starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering. A clip. Full episode exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
It made me think loads of guys, loads of white guys, very right-wing sat there wearing sunglasses and headphones.
I thought that's a bunch of podcasters.
But no, actually, Nazi war criminals on trial in the movie Nuremberg in theaters as we speak.
Well, for now, it is not doing well.
I think it made about $6 million in its opening week and it's up in two weeks or something like that.
So yeah, not it has basically already left theaters where I live.
Oh, okay.
Well, not in theaters as we speak.
Yeah, because it's not very good.
Spoilers, everybody.
In fact, I hated it.
I hated this movie.
This was terrible.
Daniel, your thoughts about Nuremberg 2025.
Okay.
Let's.
I suffer from the fact that I had four.
This is going to be a loose one, I think.
It'll be a loose one.
Yeah.
I like it.
I think I like it better than Jack does.
But I was.
You like everything more than I do.
Actually, when you really like something, you like it a lot more than I do.
Do not do not.
You like Copenhagen better than I do.
I tend to like new things better than you do, but I think that's because you hate all new things.
So, you know, I hate everything new.
Yeah.
In the last 10 years, Jack just turns his nose up at it.
I've seen this better in 1973.
No, it's fine.
I get it.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
90% of the time I'm with you.
I get to be the old man in so many conversations lately.
Anyway.
All right.
Nuremberg.
This is a story of Herman Goring, who surrenders himself to the Allies in the final days of World War II and is imprisoned and put on trial.
And he gets to have its ended conversations in the film at least with his psychiatrist by the last name of Kelly.
What's the first name?
Douglas.
Douglas Kelly.
Okay.
Real guy.
This is at least loosely based in a real story.
I did a little bit of looking into that.
It is, you know, parts of this movie are very accurate, parts of it are not.
I think we'll get into that a little bit.
And it's the story of trying to convict Herman Goring during the first Nuremberg trial.
I think Robbie Mollick plays Kelly.
I thought, I'll say this, there's kind of multiple movies happening at once here.
And that's part of the problem.
I feel like there was like, this was based on a book, and I might be interested in reading the book and seeing what captivated people to want to do this.
I mean, I think, you know, obviously a lot of the reason a lot of these movies happen is because the lead actor wants to win another Oscar.
And that's probably what happened here.
People are kind of talking about Russell Crowe as possibly being an Oscar contender for this.
Personally, if there's any justice, he is shit out of luck.
Well, I happen to.
I happen to have certain feelings about a certain other movie that's going to just demolish all its competition this year.
So I don't think we have a lot to worry about there.
But, you know, given that Leonardo DiCaprio was probably going to win that, deservedly or not, I think DiCaprio is probably going to crush that.
But yeah, it's like it's got it.
It's got, it borrows heavily.
So I did re-watch or I did watch for the first time Judgment in Nuremberg.
I've seen bits of it in the past, but I did watch it.
Great classic old Hollywood movie, Hollywood Message Picture from the early 60s.
I think we decided to do this one, or I kind of mentioned it because while I was looking at movies relating to, because after we did Mother Night as the bonus, I started looking at other, you know, this just kind of came up in my Wikipedia searches.
And I was like, oh, there's a brand new movie about Nuremberg.
Do something current in theaters and put it out to people.
Maybe it'll be good readers.
It was not good, but you know.
But I were saying to you then, you know, like Nick Nolty I mean clearly this was kind of Nick Nulti wanted an Oscar, and so this was a couple years before, and this is how you get an Oscar, is you play a bad guy?
You know you play an, an evil in a movie and about World War Ii, and suddenly you know people just spew Oscars at you.
Um, I can't, I can't imagine that's not part of what's happening in this movie.
Um, so whether Crowe, kind of like, was the initiator of this or whether he kind of you know, that's how they pitched to him.
I think that's what.
That's what Russell Crowe wants out of this, is he wants, he wants a second Oscar.
Um, I was Jack and I were talking about this before we started recording and um, he hasn't even been nominated in over 20 years.
So you know, then again, he's been in a lot of stuff anyway.
So it's partly this kind of like very dry, serious drama about this relationship between these two men and the complicity of the German, of the German people, etc.
In uh, in terms of perpetuating the holocaust, the um responsibility of Germany itself.
You know the like, the German character.
Um, it's about this psychiatrist who's kind of coming in and his motives are a little bit unclear, but it's clear that you know he wants to write a book.
He wants to make, he wants to make his name off this.
He wants to be a big person based on, you know, being the guy who interviewed, you know who interviewed Goring, and I got him to talk at Serum and then i'm going to write book and i'm going to.
It's going to be a tell-all um.
And then it's also a story about Robert Jackson.
Um, about Michael Shannon.
I think the great, the best performance in the film, or at least one of the best performances of the film I really liked easily, Michael Shannon.
I, I like Michael Shannon and pretty much everything.
I love Michael Shannon.
Yeah, really good in this.
Arguably should have been the lead character, but then you don't get the psychiatrist.
I mean the real story, the real history sorry, i'm kind of babbling, but it's.
This is going to be a loose one um, real story is.
I mean the story should be the story of Michael Shannon, and then the psychiatrist is like he's a bit character who shows up for 15 minutes in the middle or something um, any realistic version of like.
If you want to hear the story of the prosecution of Herman Goring at the at the Nuremberg trials, it's, Michael Shannon is your, is your main protagonist of that story.
That's, you know that's, that's how it is in the 2000 mini series, Alec Caldwin plays Jackson.
Jackson is the main character.
Uh Goring is the antagonist.
Uh Kelly is not in that at all.
Yeah yeah, you see, you watched the 2000s mini series with Alec Baldwin and I watched Spencer Tracy and uh STAR City casting with Judy Garland.
Of all people, you got the.
You got the best deal, I got the best deal out of that.
I guess you know although although, although I will say the 2000 mini series does have a very good performance from Brian Cox as Goering oh, and it has another amazing performance in a, in a small cameo role as one of the witnesses from Charlotte Gainsburg.
So there is some very good acting.
Yeah, there is some very good acting in it.
Yeah yeah um it's, you know, part judgment at Nuremberg.
In fact, large sections of the uh, you know the the the whole thing about, like the shirt, you know um, Romy Molick, you know befriending uh, Goring's wife, and you know that that sort of sequence of like look at how nice people they are at Sarah a lot of That stuff comes directly from Judgment at Nuremberg.
The playing of the atrocities during a long stretch of the film that's directly from Judgment and Nuremberg.
In fact, in some cases, even the same footage.
I think similar, I think it's similar to the footage that was actually shown at the actual Nuremberg trials.
Yeah, that's in the mini-series too.
And it's an extended clip of an actual movie called The Nazi Plan, which is about three hours long.
And it was direct, it was sort of stitched together from lots of other movies and some new material at the behest of the International War Crimes Tribunal.
And it was shown at the trial.
So that's historically accurate.
And then in the last like third, when the trial actually starts, because the bulk of this film is really just Romi Malik and Russell Crowe, like paling it up in the prison cells.
Like he's really teaching.
He's saying very much.
He's teaching him magic tricks.
You know, like, yeah, because Kelly was a magician.
He had a, he had, you know, he knew magic tricks.
And, you know, what a great bit for an actor to get to get to learn to do magic, you to really show the academy what how skillful you are.
You know, Russell Crowe, he puts on some money or he puts on a fat suit and suddenly like, and he speaks a little German.
My God, virtuoso acting.
Clearly, one of the best things you could possibly do for yourself is to, is to, is to slump it up as one of the fatties like me, you know, you know, and speak a little bit of German.
Yeah, no, I get that.
You know, yeah.
Or you, you do the inspiring story of, you know, a genius who has mental health struggles but overcomes them to win.
Oh, he did that as well.
He said that as well.
Yes.
And we talked about that movie and talked about that.
And it sucks.
It does.
It really does.
You don't, you don't know how much a beautiful mind sucks until you watch it with modern eyes.
And boy, you know, that is a, that is a bad.
I remember really kind of being displussed by it.
Like I liked bits of it when I saw it originally.
I saw it theatrically at 2001 or whatever.
And boy, that did, but I was weirded out by a whole lot of it.
I thought like, and then once you know the real story, it's like, oh, yeah, that is, that is, we're going to use a term here, a term of endearment, a term of art, term of Hollywood horseshit.
And I got this term from William Goldman, from one of William Goldman's books, Adventures in the Screen Trade.
William Goldman being the screenwriter and the writer of the book.
He wrote The Princess Bride, who wrote Butch Jay, Cassie and the Sundays Kid.
He wrote a bunch of stuff.
He wrote the classic Hollywood screenwriter going by back.
And he described Hollywood horseshit as like Hollywood horseshit is fine.
You know, you're making Hollywood horseshit.
You know, it's got, you know, the standard, you know, the hero has to win at the end, you know, the whole, you know, people love it.
It's what, it's what gets asses in seats.
That's your Hollywood horseshit.
When you're doing this kind of movie and you're trying to do something like a serious depiction of an examination, something that's pretending to this examination of the complicity of the German people or of, you know, Germany at large in the atrocities of World War II, in the atrocities of the Holocaust.
And then you mirror it with basically it becomes a few good men in the final third.
And, you know, you can't handle the truth.
You know, except it's in a bad German accent.
In a bad German accent.
Yes, exactly.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
I'm just, I mean, I kind of express it.
Like, there are bits that I like.
I really thought bits of Malik, like the thing it's reaching for of how much is Kelly being influenced by this, like the, like the, like the magnetism of the Nazi idea and the magnetism of his own desires to write this book and to be famous, et cetera.
Um, how much is he overly humanizing the Nazis?
Because I think humanizing the Nazis is an important thing to do.
But I thought it was reaching for something interesting in that kind of in the very earliest stuff.
When Malik is our Kelly, Malik Malik, I think, you know, I think Malik is, he's good.
He's good.
And I think when he's good here is when he is kind of being more vital and more self-obsessed and a little bit more money hungry.
And, you know, when he's when he's kind of being an asshole, I really like him.
And that's when he's trying when he's being an asshole.
But it's just hard to square with.
And then suddenly he's the unsung hero at the end who did basically nothing to actually evacuate anything regarding convicting Herman Göring.
So I don't know.
It's a big mess.
And commits the fatal sin, in my opinion, is that I was checking my watch through a whole bunch of this.
I was actively bored during big chunks of this movie.
And that's just not, you know, you never want to be in that place where I'm like, okay, when do I get to say I'm done with this movie?
I did not almost walk out.
I knew I was, but I was, you know, I was close.
And then I did not end up rewatching it.
I was planning to rewatch it.
And I paid Bunny for this.
I saw it theatrically.
Not the worst $10 I've ever spent, but definitely up there.
Anyway, your thoughts?
What do you have to say about any of that?
I mean, I agree with most of what you said.
It is just tedious.
And it has a fundamental dramatic problem, which it shares with the mini-series, which is that it, you know, there really aren't stakes.
The big Nazi war criminals were never in any danger of being found not guilty and released.
Right.
You know, Germany was in ruins.
The Nazi party had gone down in flames.
You know, for all that people try to talk us into believing it throughout the film, there's no imminent danger of a Nazi resurgence in Germany.
You know, it's not, it's not going to happen.
The country is literally occupied by three massive foreign powers that are, you know, and Goering is not going to talk his way out of the courtroom or anything like that.
And everybody knew that.
And so the film desperately tries to persuade you that there's something at stake.
You know, like Goering might win the case and be found not guilty and walk out of the courtroom and lead the German people to the Fourth Reich instantly and stuff.
And that's, you know, it's not, it's not going to happen.
Obviously, it's not going to happen.
We're watching, we're watching something essentially predetermined just unfold as it was always going to unfold.
So there really aren't dramatic stakes, except to do with people's careers.
Well, and except for like the Hollywood horseshit of it, like you have to, in the movie, it has to seem that way because it heightens the stakes.
If you know the real history, you know, this is nonsense.
But yes.
There are some interesting moments in it.
It goes some places at a couple of times.
There's, you know, Goering is allowed to raise Hiroshima, for instance.
And I mean, Kelly instantly comes back with, well, you know, we were at war and we were bombing weapons factories and we killed some civilians as collateral damage.
That's different to what you did, which without wanting to sound like I'm equivocating about the Holocaust, because, you know, the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust were completely incommensurable.
No, that's not, that's not true.
But of course, you know, the movie sort of, it does raise it and it raises the complicity of the Catholic Church before the war.
I don't know historicity of, you know, Justice Jackson going to talk personally with the Pope.
Oh, yeah.
The trial doesn't happen.
I don't think that.
I don't.
These trials are not actually something I know very much about, but I doubt that happened.
But it does, it does raise some issues.
You know, you have the speech at the end where the army translator who turns out to have been born in Germany and to be Jewish.
In the least surprising, The very least expected third act twist imaginable in a film that the German-speaking American soldier, who we have been, you know, continually subjected to as the friendship that he has with in the antagonism that he has towards one of our main characters turns out to be, oh, no, no, I was born in Germany.
I grew up here.
My family was victims of the Holocaust.
Oh, it gives our, it gives our stunning lead the moral strength to actually do what's right.
It was just such, yeah, no, that's a, I mean, it's, I think that young actor is very good.
I really liked his performance here.
I think he does well.
He does.
He's doing what he's doing what he can with the material, but boy, that was especially the scene they're like, you know, late at night in the library and they're like searching around with flashlights.
The kids couldn't have waited till seven.
I mean, seriously.
Anyway, you know, they're hunting around with flashlights in this burnt out husk of a library.
And Rami Malik is, as Douglas Kelly says, something like, you know, we have to, we have to figure out what's wrong with the Germans.
At first, he's talking about like the German, like these particular individuals and this, you know, the psychosis, the psychology that led to this horror.
And then he starts to just casually talk about them as Germans.
It's like, oh, we have to know what's wrong with the Germans.
And you get a nice good cut to this character.
And it's like, oh, yeah, I know where this is going.
But that's, that's kind of the movie, good and bad in a nutshell.
Yeah, no, exactly.
You do, you do get that, that speech from that, that guy who says, at one point, he says, you know, my family were trying to get out.
We're Jewish and we're being persecuted and we're trying to get out.
And no other countries would take us.
And it's interesting for a movie like this to go there to bring that up.
That, you know, loads of countries across Europe just wouldn't take Jewish refugees or didn't take very many, et cetera, including my own, refused to take very many Jewish refugees.
That's interesting.
That's not the sort of thing that gets raised in stuff like this that I'm accustomed to.
And also that bit you just mentioned, where early on, the Kelly character is talking about working out how this happened.
And what he says is, indeed, you know, what's wrong with the Germans?
Well, that's interesting as well, because that's kind of a thing that's been forgotten about in the way we remember this.
That a lot of people at the time, there was this thing called the Zonderweg hypothesis, which was basically that Germany had somehow departed from Western civilization.
You know, it had lost its connection with the normal, obviously, you know, the noble, law-abiding civilization of Europe somehow.
Germans have just gone wrong somehow.
And part of the rationale behind this entire process of the trials was they were consciously, people like Jackson, they were consciously thinking in terms of we need to put Germany back into the West.
We need to reintegrate them into Western civilization.
So it's sort of, it's raising some interesting things here and there.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, and I think that like, even the idea of like, what is your complicity in terms of understanding these people?
What is the, you know, the fact that Goring and other, you know, other people are raising the things of like, well, what about the bobbings of Hiroshima Nagasaki?
It's like, yeah, also a war crime.
Yes, I agree.
What about the entertainment camps?
Also a war crime.
I agree.
You are correct.
I agree with Goring in the exact different opposite direction.
Yes.
And Churchill starving Bengal and the French in Algeria and the Soviet Union starving Ukraine.
Yes.
Yes, indeed.
Heavy duty hypocrisy at work here, no doubt at all.
Yeah.
And I'm afraid that's all you're getting of that, at least for the time being.
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