Customer Reviews

Town Without Pity [VHS]

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the best legal dramas, in my opinion, and still a powerful and haunting film after 40 years. Memorable performances from Kirk Douglas as the defense attorney, Christine Kaufman as the teenage rape victim, and Robert Blake and Frank Sutton among the defendants. It's unfortunate that the only extra is the original theatrical trailer.

Town Without Pity is a signature Kirk Douglas performance. He plays a JAG lawyer in Germany charged with defending a group of soldiers who are accused of raping a local girl.

Douglas' character knows that to properly defend his clients (who include Richard Jaeckel, Robert Blake, and Frank Sutton), he will have to destroy the girl on the stand. He doesn't want to do it, but circumstances seem to point to its inevitability.

Douglas always seemed to play one of two character types. As the villain, he was ruthless, ambitious, arrogant, and willing to do whatever and sacrifice whomever to achieve his goal. As the hero, he seemed to specialize in playing men who are decent, honorable, noble people who are trying to do the right thing despite overwheliming obstacles like bureaucracy, intolerance, and cruelty. In both, he excelled at playing the tortured soul who suffers despite his motivations.

This is a great film, and worthy of many viewings.

Town Without Pity could have been the ultimate exploitation film, if it didn't go beyond the sensationalism of the trailers. Instead it is an excellent character study of a conflicted military lawyer with an impossible job, a victim whose suffering doesn't stop, and a father whose position is endangered by the prejudices or envy of the townspeople. Their attitudes toward poor Karin are poorly explained; we have only Major Garrett's speculation on why they turn against this innocent girl. They tell outrageous lies, repeat rumors, and do whatever they can to sully her reputation. Their motives, however, are less important than how this film indicts a legal system that allows an accused rapist's counsel to blame the victim.

Kirk Douglas gives a stellar performance as the officer who does the dirty job he is assigned and later feels a remorse he isn't permitted to show. Frank Sutton and the other actors playing the defendants paint a picture of pure evil. The best performances are by Christine Kaufmann as the tragic Karin, Hans Nielsen as Karin's deceived father, and Gerhart Lippert as her justifiably outraged boyfriend. Tieing it all together is Barbara Rutting as the German journalist who may be the only person to see through what is going on, but who is straitjacketed by the journalistic responsibility to remain neutral, if only in print.

It is shocking that this film didn't provoke earlier passage of rape shield laws, and for this reason should be mandatory viewing whenever those laws are threatened.

This is an excellent film and a story well told. The time is 1960, the place, West Germany, in a town in which a large US Army contingent is based. The story deals with a tragic rape of a young German girl by four GIs.

Of course, the entire town is howling for the death penalty to be meted out to the four soldiers, three of whom are clearly guilty. The American command is equally horrified and determines that the crime of the four soldiers is an outrage and will be tried and treated as one, with an open trial in the center of town. Much of the town attends.

The film brilliantly develops the theme of the story--the town is riven by hatreds and divisions of wealth and class. Its outrage over the crimes of the soldiers becomes overshadowed by the rivalries and resentments involving the young victim's family. Soon the trial becomes a forum for ridiculing the girl and her family, and ruining what should have been a spotless reputation.

Kirk Douglas turns in a fine performance as the defense counsel, who is both sympathetic to the victim, and ruthless in his tactics aimed at sparing his four clients the death penalty. The courtroom drama here is superb and for once, generally true to life. This is a fascinating film, but unfortunately not a happy or uplifting one.

This film has a special attraction to me, as it was set in postwar Germany, where I served as an Army officer in the 1970s. This film very accurately captures the attitudes and interactions of American soldiers and officers, and German citizens, during the postwar period. The on-location filming adds tremendously to the authenticity of the piece.

This is a dark drama which will nevertheless not fail to move and impress the viewer.

"Town Without Pity", a U.S.-German collaboration is a tragic tale of the rape of a young teenaged girl by four U.S. soldiers stationed in post-war Germany. The crime is quickly uncovered and the soldiers are put on trial for court martial.

Kirk Douglas, playing defense attorney Major Steve Garrett has been commissioned to defend the soldiers. A crime of this magnitude could warrant the death penalty. Prosecuting attorney E.G. Marshall, in a familiar role is pushing for exactly that outcome. Poignantly, Douglas while compelled to defend his clients, feels remorse when confronted by the realization that he will have to humiliate the victim, played by 16 year old and future Mrs. Tony Curtis, Christine Kauffman during cross examination to save their lives. He begs the girl's father a proud and stubborn man to spare his daughter from this fate but is rebuffed.

The film takes us through the unfortunate trial and the lack of compassion for the victim as show by the townsfolk. This movie proves that there can be no happy ending in a story of this nature.

Included in the cast as the accused soldiers were veteran actor Richard Jaeckel, Frank Sutton (Sgt. Carter in Gomer Pyle) and a young looking and now accused murderer Robert Blake.

In order to understand this movie, you have to have some familiarity with German stage-classics, notably Wedekind's "Spring Awakening". Although it is listed as an American movie, it resembles nothing in American cinema, and is basically a German production. The director credits us with enough intelligence to listen to both languages; the Americans speak English, the Germans speak German, and a bit of voice-over narration explains things when absolutely necessary.

Once you understand the style of this movie, you can easily see it as the greatest of all the teen-angst movies that flourished around then; it makes "Rebel without a Cause" look like a Sunday picnic. The theme song became a smash hit in 1961; I often marvelled at the complexity of its music, then I found out that it was written by a real composer - Dimitri Tiomkin. Tiomkin actually wrote a lot of sentimental c**p, but I forgive him if he could turn out something this beautiful.

As to the story, I don't want to spoil things for viewers, and they can find it out from other reviews if they must. I just want to comment on the subtlety and craftsmanship that have gone into it, similar to the 1963 The Haunting. The black-and-white photography works beautifully; colour would look out of place. The heroine's final fate is not shown directly, only mentioned in a snatch of dialogue; it's much more devastating that way.

I challenge anyone to nname a courtrooom drama as effective as this one.

I have been in law practice for almost 20 years and am almost always disappointed, if not disgusted, with lawyer movies. They are typically almost cartoonish with their portrayals and overlook the crucial realities on how things are done. One of the very few exceptions is Anatomy of a Murder and this is another. Overall, I'm not a huge Kirk Douglas enthusiast, but he does a very fine job here in showing the subjective reactions that counsel often have toward doing a dirty job and in being totally professional about it. He is far better in that role here than he was in Paths of Glory, a far better known and better received film. I thoroughly recommend this as one of the great hidden treasures of legal cinema.

Classic courtroom drama challenging the methods that must be used to expose truth at the cost of relationships and reputations. Well done with intense drama fitting to Mr. Kirk Douglas' talent. Very highly recommended.

Sometimes a movie's trailer - love those trailers - can give us a different impression of a movie that what you'd imagine the filmmaker intended. The trailer for TOWN WITHOUT PITY practically screams steamy sleaze. It's today, 1960, and the place is a US Army base in Germany. Four drunk US soldiers, in civilian dress, stumble out of a bar. The soldiers are either troubled or tough, and include a young Robert Blake, the reliably perverse Richard Jaeckel, and square-jawed Frank Sutton, who's probably best remembered as the oft-angered Sgt. Carter on `Gomer Pyle, USMC.' Here he's just tough and mean. Still got the buzz cut going, though. Cut to a loving shot of pretty Christine Kaufmann in bikini. Think there's a guy in the shot with her. Cut to a below-the-knee shot of Christine, minus boyfriend, minusing herself of her bikini. Cut to a shot of a j'accusing Kirk Douglas, prowling the courtroom floor, asking a quailing Christine if she enjoys parading her body in front of men! On the basis of what the trailer shows, this one looks like a cross between Perry Mason, The Dirty Dozen, and Peyton Place.

TOWN WITHOUT PITY is quite a bit less salacious than the trailer suggests. Douglas waxes histrionic as the defense attorney with an impossible task - the pitiless town wants the maximum penalty meted out to the accused soldiers, and the only way that can happen is if the young Christine is called to testify. Douglas, befitting his star status, is a slick lawyer who anticipates cross-examining the young girl with a great deal of dread. In a bold stroke of typecasting E.G. Marshall plays the prosecuting attorney. Marshall usually brought a stoic, stolid and understated determination to the characters he played. That quality serves him well here, and allows him to maintain a rather dull dignity in the face of a legal barracuda like Douglas.

One of the better courtroom dramas around, TOWN WITHOUT PITY offers an honest and at times harrowing portrayal of the effects a trial has on the victim of rape. Less compelling is the tabloid newspaper writer, a female muckraker and the movie's overhead narrator. The movie introduces her, I guess, to give someone for Douglas to grumble at while he investigates the crime. Her purpose in a movie like this - exploiting a terrible crime for a gossip-hungry public - is underdeveloped. Perhaps most mystifying is the attitude of German citizens toward a foreign military presence in their midst. We never learn whether the soldiers are loved, hated, resented, or what have you. In fact, we never know whether the pity is being withheld from the men or from the girl. If you like courtroom dramas this one will satisfy, but don't expect much from the rest of the story.

An excellent performance by Kirk Douglas. Outstanding plot that tells what happened to European villages after the World War II.