Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Next day, in the courtroom of Prague's Pankrac prison, sentence was pronounced. Moscow-trained Rudolf Slansky, onetime secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was condemned to death by hanging. So was Vladimir Clementis, onetime Foreign Minister, who left the safety of the U.N. to return home, and was double-crossed when he got there. Nine others would also be hanged on some lonely dawn. Three of the accused were let off with life imprisonment on the ground that they had been forced to take orders from higher-ups. Said Prague's official Communist organ, Rude Pravo...
...blame for this film must go to director Harmon Jones who seemed to have no scuse of transition and the intelligent use of fading shots. Perhaps the most amazing break in this very chopply arranged tin comes near the end when what is supposed to be a tender courtroom scene suddenly turns into a burlesque show with Miss Gaynor's legs in the center of the screen...
...reality a loyal Communist hatchet-man since early youth, Rudolf Slansky and 13 co-defendants were on trial last week in a courtroom of Prague's grim old Pankrac prison. The unhappy 14 stood up while a 14,000-word indictment was read against them. Then, one by one, they "confessed." They were broken, half-dead men, but they had been left with enough wit to repeat the intricate fables, involving dozens of well-known names inside & outside Czechoslovakia, which their merciless interrogators had impressed upon them. There were no non-Communist newsmen in Prague, much less...
...loyal followers, Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis. Last week Clementis sat on the wooden benches with Slansky-a codefendant. Less than two years ago, Slansky engineered the spy trial of the American A.P. Correspondent William Oatis (who had been trying to find out what happened to Clementis) in the same courtroom of Pankrac prison. The same judges, prosecutor and "defense attorney" who served in the Oatis case last week confronted Rudolf Slansky. So it goes in the Communist inferno...
...said he had murdered a comrade, Jan Sverma, and then recruited Sverma's widow-who apparently harbored no resentment-into the Slansky ring. (A few days later the widow appeared in the courtroom-as a witness, not yet a defendant-and admitted, in tears, that she had joined the conspiracy. Commented Prague radio: "This great traitor tried vainly to simulate remorse...