Like Twelve Angry Men, Abby Mann’s brilliant script for Judgment at Nuremberg was originally written as a play—not for the stage, but for television. And like the Reginald Rose drama, it became better known for its movie treatment than its adaptation as a stage play.

The play is centered on the education of Dan Haywood, an esteemed state judge who has agreed to preside over the war crimes trial of top-level Nazis, a group that includes Ernst Janning, a German judge whose personal reputation has been every bit as esteemed as that of Haywood himself. Both film and stage play navigate Janning’s slide from principled jurist to Nazi hack, but the adaptation lacked the calm pace and steady step that allowed Spencer Tracy’s cinematic Haywood to be revealed as relentlessly fair instead of hopelessly naive.

NOTE: In the 2001 stage revival of Judgment at Nuremberg, German-speaking actor Maximilian Schell—who sparkled as defense lawyer Oscar Rolfe in the film version—played Janning.