Who is Arthur Goldman?

That’s the question at the heart of the 1975 film, The Man In The Glass Booth.

When we first meet Arthur Goldman (Maximilian Schell), he is a wealthy businessman who lives in a Manhattan high-rise and who appears to rarely leave the safety of his penthouse.  He is waited on by two assistants, Jack (Henry Brown) and Charlie (Lawrence Pressman), both of whom he talks to and treats as if they are members of his own family.  His most frequent visitor is his psychiatrist, Dr. Weissburger (Robert H. Harris), who frequently stops by and asks Arthur if he’s been taking his medication.

Arthur Goldman is a man who loves to talk.  Indeed, the first hour of the film feels almost like a nonstop monologue on the part of Goldman, with just occasional interjections from the other characters.  Goldman was born in Germany.  He talks about how, when he was young, he and his family were sent to a concentration camp and it was there that he witnessed the murder of his father by the camp’s sadistic commandant, Dorff.  Dorff is one of the many Nazis who disappeared to South America at the end of the war.

When Goldman spots a car that always seems to be parked across the street from his building, he becomes paranoid.  He says that he’s being watched and even suggests that Dorff has come to capture him.  Instead, it turns out that Mossad come for him.  As the agents explain it to Charlie, dental records prove that Arthur Goldman is actually Commandant Dorff.  Goldman/Dorff is taken back to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

Are Arthur Goldman and Dorff the same man?  Once in Israel, Goldman tells anyone who will listen that he is Dorff and that he feels no guilt for his actions.  He insists on being allowed to wear his SS uniform during the trial.  Because of threats to his safety, a booth made of bullet-proof glass has been placed in the courtroom.  As the trial commences, The Man in the Glass Booth continues to rant and rave and declare his guilt.  However, the prosecutor (Lois Nettleton) comes to doubt that the man is who he says he is.

The Man In The Glass Booth is based on a novel and play by Robert Shaw.  (The same year that The Man In The Glass Booth was released, Shaw played Quint in Jaws.)  The film was produced as a part of an experiment called American Film Theatre, in which well-known plays would be adapted to film and then would be shown at 500 participating movie theaters in America.  Each production would only be shown four times at each theater and subscriptions were sold for an entire “season” of films.  It sounds like an interesting experiment and the type of thing that I would have enjoyed if I had been around back then.  Today, of course, these productions would have just premiered on a streaming service.

The Man In The Glass Booth is a film that very much feels like a filmed play.  There are only three locations — Goldman’s penthouse, his cell, and the courtroom where he is put on trial.  The three act structure is very easy to spot.  Maximilian Schell’s performance is also very theatrical.  In fact, it’s so theatrical that, for the first hour or so, I found myself wishing that he would just stop talking for a few second or two.  He was so dramatic and so flamboyant and so intentionally over-the-top that he became somewhat exhausting.  But, during the second hour, I came to see that all of that “overacting” was actually setting up the film’s final act.  Schell talks so much that, when he finally does find himself unable to explain himself, it’s a shocking moment and one that perfectly captures not just the evil of the Nazis and the Holocaust but also how the legacy of that evil lives on after the fall of the Third Reich and the deaths of the majority of the Holocaust’s perpetrators.  At that moment, I realized that The Man In The Glass Booth never stopped speaking because silence would force him to confront the horrors of the past and the trauma, guilt, and uncertainty lurking in his subconscious.  Maximilian Schell was nominated for an Oscar for his performance here and, by the end of the film, I totally understood why.

The Man In The Glass Booth requires some patience.  Actually, it requires a lot of patience.  However, those who stick with it will discover an intelligent and thought-provoking film about not only the horror of the past but also how those in the present deal with and rationalize those horrors.  Though the film is a bit too stagey for its own good, it’s also one that sticks with you even after the curtain falls and the end credits roll.