Diritto d'offesa

One of the better TV movies ever made about a current political issue. The issues are dramatized vividly - freedom of assembly vs. the rights of a community. The performances are consistently excellent. I would especially cite Danny Kaye, whose portrayal of quivering outrage is one of the great moments of his wonderful career. I was interested to read about the career of the screenwriter, Ernest Kinoy. Among his many credits are a couple of episodes of the excellent short-lived series "The Senator" (part of "The Bold Ones"), very much a "ripped from the headlines" series. So too with this movie.

I saw this film when I was 21, and came away feeling like the title of my review.

Yes, one felt intense sympathy for Danny Kaye's character. But one also admired the ACLU attorney's dogged determination to see to it that a basic civil right of this country wasn't impinged.

It will make you nostalgic for when things were that way, when we all knew, as much as we despised the ACLU for defending people like nazis, that we also knew they would look out for us under similar circumstances.

In 2019, we have hate speech bans everywhere you look, particularly on college campuses. We also have an ACLU which now concentrates strictly on the rights of those to the left of center. Are we better off? You decide.

I would love for this to be required viewing in every high school civics class. Wait, we don't have those any more, do we?

Jake Blues said it best... "I hate Illinois Nazis."

To me, this was an excellent movie. This was one of my favorite movies of all time. Forget Schindler's list, to me this movie was a much better in certain aspects for emotion. One of the best scenes in this motion picture (one that in the 4 minutes it takes to play invokes more emotion from me as the viewer than all Schindler's list) is where Danny Kaye as Max Feldman answers his daughter's question about what happened to her grandparents. Max and his wife - holocaust survivors, have kept the horrors of the camps from their daughter. She has very little knowledge of what happened and at 13 or 14 she asks questions. Danny Kaye (Max) takes the time (against his wife's wishes) to finally tell his daughter. The strength and power of this single scene rests with the unemotional and matter of fact way that Max explains the nature of the death camp to his daughter. No emotion on the part of Max - - the character is breaking up inside yet is telling his daughter what the Nazis did to his parents in a manner to spare her the emotion. This while his wife is listening from around the corner quietly falling to pieces. You know the deep emotion that he has with the issues when he attends a meeting to discuss the question of Nazi's marching in Skokie with the vehemence and passion he holds on the issue. Yet he holds back this emotion with his daughter. Like I said, this few minutes of the movie is more powerful than the total Schindler's list - in my opinion. The full movie has its flaws, and covers the 1st amendment issues of American Nazi's right to march in detail, covering all sides of the issue. But this is a powerful movie and shows the depth of Danny Kaye's acting talents. A very surprising made for television movie about a very interesting topic. It is well done and very unlike Hollywood today.

If you are a lawyer or a judge that is interested in a documentary movie that talks about a case and what happened, this you will like Skokie. There really isn't any great acting in it, in fact a lot of the dialogue of Kaye is cheesy and overly dramaiszed. Most roles are one dimensional and overplayed, but the director did convey the message of the trial and the consequences that followed.

If you need to do a report on the Skokie trial, and you want your research to be somewhat entertaining then this movie may serve you a very good purpose, other than that I wouldn't recommend it.