Movie Reviews : ‘Judgment’ Would Make Better Case on Small Screen

“Judgment in Berlin” (selected theaters) is a taut, punchy courtroom drama involving complex and important issues. For all its passion and clarity, it plays like a movie for television and already has been sold to ABC. It probably would have gone directly to TV if it didn’t have Sean Penn in a key part.

The film’s clean, bright, straightforward quality will surely be more effective on the tube, whereas the big screen shows up its lack of style and originality, as well as those subtleties of shading and texture that were so crucial to such films as “The Verdict,” a major theatrical film also centering on a trial.

On Aug. 30, 1978, Helmut Thiele (Heinz Hoenig), an unemployed East German waiter, used a toy gun to hijack a Polish airliner bound for East Berlin and forced it to land a mere 10 miles away, at the Tempelhof Air Force Base in the American sector of West Berlin. Eager to rejoin his two sons in the West, Thiele was driven to the desperate hijacking because his original plan to escape on a Polish steamship went awry.

Because of the hijacking, Thiele became the first East German to stand trial after making it into West Germany. If Thiele’s plight was not already complicated and serious enough, he ended up being tried in a U.S. court, convened in West Berlin and presided over by an American federal judge, Herbert J. Stern (Martin Sheen), who wrote the book upon which the film is based.

The political, moral and legal questions raised by Thiele’s plight are obviously formidable, but Sheen’s Stern confronts them with an unflinching dispatch that even Harry Truman might have envied. His first order of business is to defy the State Department and insist that Thiele have a jury composed of West Berliners. Equally bold and confident is Thiele’s blustery American attorney (Sam Wanamaker).

Sheen and Wanamaker’s characterizations are certainly dynamic. However, what Leo Penn, the veteran actor and television director, draws from son Sean--who plays a crucial defense witness--is simply astonishing. “Judgment at Berlin” (MPAA-rated PG for adult themes) is a decent, worthy drama of unabashed and stirring patriotism, but when Penn is on the witness stand it becomes, for the moment, electrifying.