Memorable, crazy movie

good back-story, and good acting

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I am amazed that none of the reviews of this movie on IMDb mention that this film … as written by Robert Shaw … is a ro·man à clef (look it up if you do not know) … for the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was arrested in 1960 by the Masada and taken to Israel for trial. He was in fact was the "Man in the Glass Booth".Yes Maximillian Schell was off the charts in this performance … but the greatest facet to the film is that it replays Eichmann's trial. Eichmann was amazing in his conviction that all of the Final Solution was logical and justified and pedestrian … and we should all see this for what it is worth.Yes … I was totally annoyed by the Arthur Goldman character in the first half of the film … but I was mesmerized by the way this film played out. Schell should have beat Nicholson for the academy award! He is a massively underrated actor (see him in Judgement in Nuremberg and you will agree).

"Booth," is Schell. Nominated for an Academy Award, he came up against Jack Nicholson in "One flew over the cuckoo's nest." Watch each film, then gauge each actor's performance. Then do it again. As fine as Nicholson is, he is a couple of classes behind Schell. Schell spent years specialising in this type of role, and absolutely perfected it in "booth". Olivier and Brando must take a secondary role to Schell, and I say that fully remembering Olivier's monologue in Rebecca, which was absolutely riveting.I have many favourite films, Cinema Paradiso, Schindler's List, The Train, Wake in Fright, The Producers, Casablanca, to name a few. My choice is fairly orthodox, you would have to agree! But Schell makes "booth" my number one choice as greatest film ever. And Max is the greatest practitioner of the craft of acting I have ever seen.As for the controversy associated with this film, I can fully understand it. No one comes out smelling to good in this movie, but in the end, it is humanity on trial, and human failings are, or should be forgiven.

The main character of the film is Arthur Goldman played by Maximilian Schell, a survivor of the Holocaust and the natural guilt of surviving such an ordeal. He is also, very proud of his accomplishments, in becoming a millionaire in the United States, but with a streak of sarcasm where the Jewish belief and that of the Christian belief of the control of human destiny through these institutions is complete in its endeavors to fulfill the reason for what man does to man and the imminent conflict that arises form this question. His question is how can this be, how could it happen and most important: Why it did happen?This film gives one much to think about, especially in our times, in the late nineteenth, and twentieth century, there was a great anti-Semitist feeling that through the Nazi regime was taken to the "Final Solution" and the Holocaust of the Jews. They were singled out as the problem of the state. The state is the problem, not a group of people, this film portrays the Nazi reasoning and the Jews' incomprehension of that reason, and the hate that can be vented onto anyone. All this just to create a national feeling and then: Does not that same feeling create and maintain Israel. ("Exodus" the movie)

I have viewed this movie many times in a poor quality VHS and now finally on DVD. It's difficult to explain the impact this movie can have and one viewing will not do it. It takes several viewings to really get the plot line. Millionaire Jewish entrepreneur Arthur Goldman rules his financial empire from a penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. Seemingly at the edge of sanity, Goldman holds forth on everyting from Papal edicts to ex-wives, from baseball to his family's massacre in a Nazi concentration camp. When Goldman remarks on a blue Mercedes continuously parked outside his building, Goldman's captive audience of assistant and chauffeur dismiss their boss' anxiety as encroaching paranoia. But each of Goldman's passionate, seemingly capricious ravings are transformed into a shocking, inadvertent deposition when Israeli agents capture Goldman and put him on trial as Adolph Dorf, the commandant of the concentration camp where Goldman's family was supposedly exterminated. In a trial scene of unrelenting intensity, crafts what the Detroit Free Press called "a white-hot lead performance," mutating from eccentric Goldman to sociopath Dorf and beyond. The riddle of Dorf's true identity becomes wrapped in an enigma of cunning self-treachery and single-minded obsession.