In 1945, as Europe smoldered and the world waited for justice, the American brothers and military veterans Budd and Stuart Schulberg embarked on the most difficult and important assignment of their lives. Their mission, handed to them by the Office of Strategic Services, was to track down filmed evidence of German war atrocities, which would be used in the prosecution of Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Both brothers would go on to careers in film and television — Budd as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "On the Waterfront," Stuart as a producer of news documentaries — but not until after gaining a rare firsthand understanding of cinema's potential as an indictment of evil and an instrument of justice.
How the Schulbergs painstakingly gathered and compiled enough footage on a tight three-month deadline is one of several stories amassed in the engrossing new documentary "Filmmakers for the Prosecution." Directed by Jean-Christophe Klotz and adapted from a monograph by Stuart's daughter, Sandra Schulberg, the movie is, like so many Nuremberg accounts, an alternately thrilling and chastening portrait of accountability in action. But it is also, as its title suggests, a thoughtful appraisal of the moral properties of the moving image. The guilty verdicts at Nuremberg were achieved, it reminds us, by way of a mountain of shocking and irrefutable visual evidence, filmed by the Nazis themselves and brilliantly turned against them in a court of law.
Animated in its early stages by old TV interviews with Budd Schulberg (who died in 2009), the movie plays initially as a tribute to can-do American spirit. The brothers received their orders from none other than the director John Ford, then head of the OSS field photographic unit and a major driver of the Hollywood war effort. Budd attributes some of their footage-finding success to a fateful meeting with a Red Army captain who himself turned out to be a Ford super-fan and scholar. (That fleeting sense of kinship between American and Soviet veterans finds a sad counter-echo in the film's later passages, which detail how a promising spirit of postwar international collaboration fell apart with the onset of the Cold War.)
