![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Distracting Discovery
Feb. 15th, 2016 01:19 pmMy combination hard disk and DVD recorder is very handy for saving things on TV to watch, but its instructions do caution me against putting more than two and a half hours of video on one disc. When an interesting-sounding film on Turner Classic Movies runs longer than that, I have to hope it'll include an "intermission" or at least a suitable point to break it into two parts. To find that point, though, I have to watch the movie, and recording them is a lot easier than watching them. When I found the time last weekend to view one of the long movies I've had on the hard drive for quite a while, I pondered which of them to watch for a few moments and then settled on Judgment at Nuremberg, which had been waiting the longest. I did know Stanley Kramer had a reputation for earnest "message" pictures which did always seemed to inspire "just a shade short of true greatness" comments, but I supposed I could handle that. What I didn't know was the movie's cast included William Shatner.
It wasn't a major role, but it wasn't a brief, midway-through appearance either; Shatner played a young US Army officer assigned as the assistant to Spencer Tracy's judge. It was instantly tempting to filter his performance through the swaggering caricature that's built up over the years and find indisputable "Shatner-ness" in it (his character mentioning romancing a young German woman did help). That provoked some odd yet amused reactions from me, especially when I took a break about midway through the movie to watch the rest the next evening. In that time, though, I did get to thinking about a concern I've had about the revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000, that the new writers will be limited by a more circumscribed set of "fannish" references, and wondered if I'd made a criticism I really ought to apply to myself as well, even if my swift and reductive summing-up might have at least been "amused"... The second half of the movie, in any case, did get still more serious, and that hammered some perspective back into me.
It wasn't a major role, but it wasn't a brief, midway-through appearance either; Shatner played a young US Army officer assigned as the assistant to Spencer Tracy's judge. It was instantly tempting to filter his performance through the swaggering caricature that's built up over the years and find indisputable "Shatner-ness" in it (his character mentioning romancing a young German woman did help). That provoked some odd yet amused reactions from me, especially when I took a break about midway through the movie to watch the rest the next evening. In that time, though, I did get to thinking about a concern I've had about the revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000, that the new writers will be limited by a more circumscribed set of "fannish" references, and wondered if I'd made a criticism I really ought to apply to myself as well, even if my swift and reductive summing-up might have at least been "amused"... The second half of the movie, in any case, did get still more serious, and that hammered some perspective back into me.