Product Description

Studio: Kino International Release Date: 07/22/2003 Run time: 117 minutes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36112 in DVD
• Brand: Kino Video
• Released on: 2003-07-22
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 117 minutes

Customer Reviews

The ultimate guilt trip
While watching the 2001 release THE BELIEVER, it recalled to mind THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH. Though I haven't viewed the latter movie in over a decade, the power of Maximilian Schell's performance puts it on my list of "Most Memorable Films", though perhaps my memory of the details is fuzzy.

Schell is Arthur Goldman, a wealthy Jewish industrialist living in a Manhattan highrise apartment. Goldman is apparently a recluse, who deals with the world through his personal assistant, Charlie (Lawrence Pressman). At first, Arthur seems like a regular guy, albeit expressing outrageous views on Jews and Judaism, but it becomes apparent to the audience that the man has serious issues when he's seen burning the skin under his upper arm with a candle flame. Then, the audience and Charlie are dumbfounded when an Israeli hit team breaks in, kidnaps Goldman, and carries him off to trial in Israel as a war criminal - a former Nazi concentration camp commandant, Adolph Dorf. Goldman insists pretrial that he be allowed to wear a full SS uniform. For his own protection, then, he faces his accusers as THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH. Bullet-proof glass, that is, considering the emotional volatility of the charges to camp survivors that are present.

Schell received Oscar and Golden Globe Best Actor nominations for his depiction of a man so tortured by guilt that he would go to extremes to exorcise it. Personal guilt for having survived the Holocaust; collective Jewish guilt for not having fought back. Taking on the persona of Dorf, Goldman gleefully mocks the Jews for their meekness as they went to slaughter. The sad end to the trial is one of the most emotionally compelling scenes I've ever watched.

THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH was one of the first VHS tapes I purchased back in 1979 when I bought my first video recorder. (Both the tape and the recorder were MUCH more expensive back then!) Do yourself a favor and rent this film (along with THE BELIEVER) for a thought-provoking double feature on the psyche-twisting nature of guilt.

Maximilian Schell should have won the Oscar for this in 1975
Thirty years ago, under the aegis of the "American Film Theatre," Arthur Hiller directed a movie based on a novel by writer, director and actor Robert Shaw (famous for his performance in "Jaws" as the fisherman who came to a bad end in the mouth of a great white shark). Whatever doubts one has about the plausibility of an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, whose schizophrenia tears him between the morally opposite identities of a sadistic concentration camp commandant, and a Jewish holocaust survivor, Maximilian Schell as "The Man In the Glass Booth," gives a riviting and explosive performance. The story is divided into two acts; the first half taking place in Arthur Goldman's luxurious Manhattan penthouse apartment, and the second half in an Israeli courtroom. The final courtroom scene, when Goldman's true identity is revealed, is astonishing.

A psycho-fable of the highest merit
Yes, yes I know all the fulminations comparing this film to the play. I haven't seen the play nor read the novel, so I'm judging purely by the film, which I rate at the very highest. OF COURSE the movie is "contrived" as Leonard Maltin's movie guide has it, that's what fables do (talking wolves, trees that sing, clouds that weep and preach a moral), they present contrived situations in order to elucidate. This psycho-fable unearths the ghoulish byplay of fire and ice in all of us, Jew or Bosch, whichever side of the barbed wire of things you stand. Schell's acting is superlative, and the LANGUAGE is English at its nightmare-wittiest. To summarize: you can't like "Doctor Strangelove" and scorn this film: they're two sides of the same rifle butt.

Dr. Theodore Voelkel
Winchester Mass.