‘Your Honours, never again’: political trials in the movies

With former President of the United States Donald Trump now indicted on four counts relating to attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, here’s a look at motion pictures where leaders are put on trial.

To Kill a King (2003) – full movie available on YouTube

I confess to possessing little sympathy with the plight of King Charles I in Mike Barker’s (Best Laid Plans, 1999) watchable English Civil War drama. As depicted by Rupert Everett, he’s arrogant, petulant, and totally untrustworthy. He seems to accept parliament’s mild terms for peace, all while plotting further bloodshed in the name of the ‘divine right of Kings’.

To his credit, Charles faces his end bravely. But despite his the charitable words to those who condemned him (‘He told me he had forgiven all his enemies, and hoped God would forgive them also; and commanded us, and all the rest of my brothers and sisters, to forgive them’), his son, the restored Charles II, enacts brutal revenge on those regicides he could get his hands on.

Nuremberg (2000) – full movie available on YouTube

Brian Cox (Succession) pulls off a remarkably plausible portrait of Hitler’s right hand man Hermann Göring in this TV movie from 2000.