George Stevens was already a success in Hollywood, having directed Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935) as well as prominent work with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers but still wasn't the kind of big name that got lots of press, like John Ford or Frank Capra, when they took to shooting their overseas efforts for the OWI. Perhaps because of that, because he didn't have as big a celebrity image to protect, George Stevens' work with the OWI is probably the most brutal, the most revealing and, even now, among the hardest to watch. Near the end of the war, after the horrors of Nazism were being uncovered with each new liberation of a concentration camp, such as Dachau, George Stevens directed That Justice Be Done, an unflinching document of Nazi atrocities that is still powerful and relevant today.
The film, a short subject of only a little over 11 minutes, opens with a shot of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, and the uncredited narrator reading Thomas Jefferson's words aloud, that all forms of tyranny are to be met with "eternal hostility." This immediately cuts to Adolph Hitler making one of his hate-filled, fiery speeches expressing, as the narration translates, that he "surely [has] the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin." This is followed by images of those poor souls in the concentration camps lost to starvation, gassing, and execution by gunfire as the soundtrack repeats the cacophony of the German people chanting, "Sieg heil!" It is a powerful and disturbing moment, one that, all these years later, has lost none of its power.
The narration was written by Budd Schulberg, who would later come to prominence for his work on such Hollywood classics as On the Waterfront (1954) and A Face in the Crowd (1957). He would also become a controversial figure during the Red Scare where Hollywood writers, directors, and actors were blacklisted for Communist Party affiliations. Controversial because, along with many faced with blacklisting, he eventually cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and even seemed to justify it as a morally acceptable act with his story in On the Waterfront. Here, years before any of that came to pass, Schulberg displayed his undeniable talent as a writer by not only providing emotional text - "this is murder, deliberate murder, defying every written and unwritten law of man." - but deftly explaining, without getting into the weeds of legalese, how exactly the war crimes trials would work and who would carry them out. It wasn't an easy task but Schulberg tackled it exceptionally well.
At the heart of it, though, is the talent of George Stevens and his ability to show an audience what they don't want to see but must. Right from the beginning, when that previously mentioned footage of Nazi horror is shown, nothing is held back. Emaciated cadavers, dead children, rotting corpses, it's all shown in close-up and without blurring or blocked images to hand-hold the viewer.
George Stevens became one of Hollywood's most sought out directors after the war and directed such classics as I Remember Mama (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956), and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). He would win two Oscars for Best Director (for A Place in the Sun and Giant) and retire a success story, having made it as a cinematographer and director. But his most important work, in many ways, was the work he did with the OWI. It wasn't just propaganda, although that was certainly a part of it, it was something more, something necessary. The footage that Stevens shot was used in the war crimes trials of Nazis who, as a result of much of it, were prosecuted and executed. What had happened, what the Nazis had done, what had been discovered, was too important to sanitize. It had to be more than shown, it had to be exposed for all the world to see. George Stevens did just that and, in the process, not only helped the war effort, he helped the world understand the dangers of extremism and racial ideologies and hopefully ensured that it would never happen again.
By Greg Ferrara
