Actor Robert Shaw in addition to being a great player both before the stage lights and screen camera also wrote this unusual and challenging play about a strange and troubled Jewish man. On Broadway it ran for 264 performances in the 1968-69 season and starred Donald Pleasence. For the screen Maximilian Schell took over the role of Arthur Goldman, a rich concentration camp survivor who moved to America and became a wealthy builder.
As his friends and former wives know, Schell is probably the most anti- Semitic Jew on the planet earth, constantly making disparaging remarks about his own people. A lot of Jews who went through the Holocaust experience lost faith in the religion that did not deliver them from evil unleashed. But his remarks are really in horrible taste, yet he's rich enough that people tolerate a terrible eccentricity.
But one fine day men from Israel come and kidnap him and the next thing we know, Schell is in a glass booth in a courtroom on trial for his life. For he's being accused of taking the identity of Arthur Goldman and really being the commandant of the camp where Goldman was one of the many slaughtered. A determined prosecutor played by Lois Nettleton seems to have the goods on Schell.
Schell is defiant to the end, even insisting on wearing an S.S. uniform in court. In the end however he is humbled in the most humiliating lie of his whole life. It turns out his was a case of self hatred, he was a collaborationist Jew who the Nazis used both in camps and in city zoned ghettos to control the population.
It's impossible to discuss The Man In The Glass Booth without revealing the ending. Internalized self hate is a powerful weapon indeed used by one group of people keeping another one down. In his authorized biography Branch Rickey told a story of a black man he went to school with who could not have the athletic career he wanted up against white American prejudice and breaking down and sobbing about how cursed he was with his race.
I'm in a minority group that only in the last century found its voice and united to stop centuries old prejudice. Internalized homophobia is one of the worst things a gay person has to overcome in order to function. Until recently society just pounded how inferior we are into our every day and we had no recourse. Many opted for suicide, sadly many still do.
Schell's character is no different than many self hating gays I've known. If he was a gay man in the camp instead of a Jew he might have more willingly allowed himself to be used as a sex object. If you recall in Exodus, Sal Mineo survived in the camp by being just that, albeit an unwilling one. What do think Larry Craig or Ted Haggard might be doing in Auschwitz?
The poor soul that Schell played and I say that because he might have become wealthy, but his soul was starved indeed, was maybe someone who sold out his own people for an extra bit of ration, just trying to survive in the most horrible situation imaginable. He was filled more with shame than with hate and in the end it destroyed him.
Maximilian Schell received an Academy Award nomination for a man inside the dock as opposed to being a defense attorney for the Nazis as he was in Judgment at Nuremberg. He won his Oscar for that role, but didn't make it on this try, Schell was up against Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a film about a different kind of psychosis.
The Man In The Glass Booth has the distinction of being the last production of that worthy endeavor called the American Film Theater which sought to bring quality work to the screen that otherwise might not be considered commercial enough for Hollywood. Why it failed ultimately is the source of lots of speculation, but it did sadly enough. Still this film was a worthy curtain call to that noble idea.
As his friends and former wives know, Schell is probably the most anti- Semitic Jew on the planet earth, constantly making disparaging remarks about his own people. A lot of Jews who went through the Holocaust experience lost faith in the religion that did not deliver them from evil unleashed. But his remarks are really in horrible taste, yet he's rich enough that people tolerate a terrible eccentricity.
But one fine day men from Israel come and kidnap him and the next thing we know, Schell is in a glass booth in a courtroom on trial for his life. For he's being accused of taking the identity of Arthur Goldman and really being the commandant of the camp where Goldman was one of the many slaughtered. A determined prosecutor played by Lois Nettleton seems to have the goods on Schell.
Schell is defiant to the end, even insisting on wearing an S.S. uniform in court. In the end however he is humbled in the most humiliating lie of his whole life. It turns out his was a case of self hatred, he was a collaborationist Jew who the Nazis used both in camps and in city zoned ghettos to control the population.
It's impossible to discuss The Man In The Glass Booth without revealing the ending. Internalized self hate is a powerful weapon indeed used by one group of people keeping another one down. In his authorized biography Branch Rickey told a story of a black man he went to school with who could not have the athletic career he wanted up against white American prejudice and breaking down and sobbing about how cursed he was with his race.
I'm in a minority group that only in the last century found its voice and united to stop centuries old prejudice. Internalized homophobia is one of the worst things a gay person has to overcome in order to function. Until recently society just pounded how inferior we are into our every day and we had no recourse. Many opted for suicide, sadly many still do.
Schell's character is no different than many self hating gays I've known. If he was a gay man in the camp instead of a Jew he might have more willingly allowed himself to be used as a sex object. If you recall in Exodus, Sal Mineo survived in the camp by being just that, albeit an unwilling one. What do think Larry Craig or Ted Haggard might be doing in Auschwitz?
The poor soul that Schell played and I say that because he might have become wealthy, but his soul was starved indeed, was maybe someone who sold out his own people for an extra bit of ration, just trying to survive in the most horrible situation imaginable. He was filled more with shame than with hate and in the end it destroyed him.
Maximilian Schell received an Academy Award nomination for a man inside the dock as opposed to being a defense attorney for the Nazis as he was in Judgment at Nuremberg. He won his Oscar for that role, but didn't make it on this try, Schell was up against Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a film about a different kind of psychosis.
The Man In The Glass Booth has the distinction of being the last production of that worthy endeavor called the American Film Theater which sought to bring quality work to the screen that otherwise might not be considered commercial enough for Hollywood. Why it failed ultimately is the source of lots of speculation, but it did sadly enough. Still this film was a worthy curtain call to that noble idea.