This film spends a long time on background, and waits too late to bring the court hearings into it. Al Pacino does do an inspired closing, but the jury decision makes no sense in this context. I wish someone had bothered to go to the court records and pull out what the jury looked at to put it into the film to make sense.

Why would a jury disregard the fact that Axis Sally was scripted and spoke other persons word for 7 counts, but then find her guilty for doing the exact same thing on count number 8? That is the perplexing problem here. With what is presented, the verdict makes no sense. There's something missing that made the jury do that, but it's not in the film.

The sequencing is good, but does ramble going back and forth with Axis Sally's life, but at least when it goes back it says when and where it is going. The script does a poor job bringing the characters to life. The only salvation is in the closing credits when one of the real people in the film gets a chance to talk. I love the history here, but hate the way it is presented. There has got to be another way.

The cast is good, but they do not really get the material to work with.

"American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally" is a dramatization of the trial of Mildred Gillars, the woman referred to as Axis Sally during WWII. This American woman was called this because after renouncing her citizenshp and moving to Germany, she began broadcasting for the German propaganda machine. What were the broadcasts? They involved trying to demoralize the Allied soldiers and she was similar to the woman known in the Pacific as 'Tokyo Rose'.

The film was okay...not bad, not good. I think I felt this way because although well made, late in the story the filmmakers tried to make the audience feel sorry for the woman. Considering she helped the Nazi war machine, she was a traitor...and I'd rather extend my sympathies towards someone a bit more deserving. Without this VERY sympathetic ending, I would have scored this one a bit higher.

For some reason, as a kid, I went through the newspaper. Not sure how much I took in. But I remember some stories. One was about the release of Mildred Gillars, better known as Axis Sally. This would have been in 1961. I can remember my father didn't have very nice things to say about her.

American Traitor purports to tell the story of Gillars and presents her sympathetically. She was an American wanting to make it in show business who moved to Paris and then to Berlin in the 1930s. When the U. S. government told Americans to get out, she stayed because of her fiance (who was later killed in the service).

Originally she worked on the radio, reading propaganda to keep the U. S. out of joining Britain in the war. Once the U. S. got into the war, however, she no longer wanted to do that work and wanted to go home.

However, it was too late. The Germans had her passport and papers, and she either continued to read the scripts they gave her or have a very unpleasant time of it. She complied.

In this version of events, she was forced into sleeping with Goebbels (Thomas Kretschmann). He also beat her when she changed a word in a script. No way of knowing if these things are true. She was involved with Max Otto Koischwitz (Carsten Norgaard),who was her producer and whom she cared about very deeply.

Al Pacino plays her attorney, James J. Laughlin, and Sven Temmel is Billy Owen, his second chair (there is a small interview with Owen during the final credits). Laughlin's premise was that Gillars did what she had to do in order to survive, and that none of us know what we would have done. It's something to think about.

Meadow Williams is Mildred, and though the actress is 55 years old, she looks younger than the real Mildred, who was actually 44 or so at the time of her arrest. She uses a soft voice and a whiny, off key singing voice in the role.

Pacino as usual plays to the balcony but is believable as a no-nonsense attorney.

This was a vanity production of Williams, who inherited $8 million from her late husband. Production values suggest she has plenty of money left over.