| Notes: Director: Lewis Allen; Sealed Verdict boasts a complicated plot that deals with events surrounding a 1946 trial in Germany, of an accused German War criminal. The film opens with Ray Milland watching newsreel footage of the Nuremberg Trials. Gordon Deane, who served as an assistant to Justice Robert Jackson, who was the Chief Prosecutor in the real trials, served as Technical advisor in this film. Sealed Verdict is thus one of the earliest American films to deal with the Holocaust. A secondary character, but essential to the plot, is that played by Ludwig Donath as the Jewish landlord who in spite of what happened to his parents at the hands of the Nazis, is giving shelter to the accused criminal's mother. It should be noted that the crime of the accused is a reprisal mass execution of Czech hostages in the fictional "Leemach Massacre". It is obvious that it was meant to reference the real Lidice Massacre, as a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. |
