The Man In The Glass Booth

The Man In The Glass Booth is one of those films which depend entirely upon a big reveal at its end to make its point. It does so quite impressively, the trouble is that to get there one has to sit through nearly two hours of ceaseless verbosity and Maximillian Schell’s over-the-top performance.  This may not have been such big ask in its day but we’ve since had 40 years of fiction and documentary films examining every aspect of the Nazi phenomenon and so it all feels rather superfluous.

Schell plays Arthur Goldman, a super-wealthy New York property developer who apparently is suffering from Holocaust survivor syndrome and is haunted by the memory of concentration commandant, Colonel Dorf. That is, until he is captured by Israeli agents who claim that he is Dorf and ship him back to Israel for trial. The trial takes place with, clearly referring to the Eichmann trial, Dorf housed in specially constructed glass booth, as attempts are made to get to the bottom of Dorf’s action and his rationale for doing so.

Penned by Robert Shaw, an actor better known for films such as Jaws and The Sting, the play is relentlessly wordy and Hiller doesn’t vary the tone from the hyperbolically emoting presentation of the stage play but this sits uncomfortably with the naturalistic settings he gives them and the more intimate connection afforded by the camera.  As a result Schell’s performance seems wildly exaggerated and particularly in the trial sequences completely beyond belief, hardly, one would have thought, the object of the exercise. A telling instance of the incongruity is Stan Winston’s make-up which whilst succeeding in transforming Schell also makes him looks like something out of Madame Tussaud's. What works on a theatre stage simply looks phony to the camera.

The production was one of the 'American Film Theater' series of transcriptions of major plays of the period, and no doubt in its time this film made an impact on many. Today it is somewhat of an ungainly curio.

 

Want something different?