Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

QB VII's title refers to Queen's Bench VII, the London courtroom in which an author defends himself in a libel suit brought by a distinguished doctor. The author has accused him of conducting gruesome experiments for the Nazis in Poland during World War II.

The title also comes in handy as a guidepost for anyone wanting to wade through this exceedingly long 1974 television adaptation of Leon Uris' novel, which is well-reviewed and so must bear little resemblance to the small-screen version. Pay attention to the parts of the movie that take place in court, if you must, but feel free to skip everything else. You will miss nothing important and the parts you avoid are almost unrelentingly tedious.

Anthony Hopkins plays Adam Kelno, an anti-Communist Polish doctor who was taken prisoner by the Nazis and forced to practice medicine in a concentration camp. His job was to keep prisoners alive until the Nazis could work them to death.

After the war, he becomes a British subject and is threatened briefly with deportation to Poland until that country's Communist government fails to make its case that the doctor performed cruel experimental sterilizations on Jewish prisoners. Desperate to avoid further scrutiny in his adopted homeland, Kelno takes his wife and son to Kuwait, where he treats remote tribes and cures them of deafness, diphtheria and impotence. The only bit of humor in a series that lasts longer than six hours comes when the doctor jokingly refers to himself as "Albert Schweitzer of the desert."

John Gielgud appears in this very long first part and gets to speak only about three lines. That waste of a great actor would seem a serious failure, if the movie weren't plagued by many others that are worse.

Kelno's work earns him a knighthood. His wife (Leslie Caron) convinces him to return to England but instead of setting up the glamorous, lucrative practice she dreams of, he joins the national health system and treats working-class and poor people.

Although it does not seem possible, the pacing is even more funereal in the second part of the series. Abraham Cady (Ben Gazzara) is an American who flies with the British Royal Air Force during WWII and then becomes a successful novelist. He is rich and his wife is beautiful but his womanizing makes them unhappy in ways they talk and argue about at great length, extremely great length. Their son is a devout Jew, more like his paternal grandfather than his father. When the grandfather dies, Cady pledges to be a better Jew.

This leads him to move to Israel to research a novel, The Holocaust, that becomes an international best-seller. In it, Cady mentions Kelno in passing and accuses him of performing hundreds of sterilizations and castrations on Jews who were not anesthetized. Kelno files suit and the movie -- at long last -- lurches to the courtroom, where what could charitably be called the most interesting parts take place.

Even in court there is little to recommend QB VII. The outcome is obvious early on and it is foreshadowed clumsily when a musical chorus accompanies the entrance of concentration camp survivors who will testify. It is as if a host of agonized angels is heralding their arrival and telegraphing the verdict. Everything done in court in QB VII was done more subtly and powerfully in the superior courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg.

A typical bit of silliness viewers must endure comes when Cady asks his new girlfriend (Lee Remick) to tell his lawyers to string out their case a bit while he steps out of the courtroom to do something vital for the case. This might make sense if he were going to make a quick phone call. What he does instead is: persuade the British government to secure the cooperation of the Polish government; fly to Krakow; meet the Communist official who might help him; kidnap a man and drag him to the remains of a concentration camp; behave like a Nazi to get the man's cooperation; and fly back to England.

He does all of that to secure a vital document that has miraculously survived. One suspects he should have tried to obtain it before the final seconds of his weeks-long trial. It is an exceedingly unlikely and unsurprising deus ex machina.

QB VII emphasizes the need to remember Nazi atrocities so they are not repeated. Perhaps the movie helped to set the stage for such subsequent important works as Holocaust and Schindler's List. If so, one can be grateful for it. That gratitude is far easier to feel if one doesn't have to sit through QB VII itself.



Recommended: No