Dir. Bryan Singer, US/Germany, 2008, 121 mins
Cast: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy
Review by Carol Allen
Although most of us are aware that there were “good” Germans who opposed Hitler’s policies and indeed tried to kill him, the details are not that widely known. This story of the assassination plot led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) might perhaps cheer the Germans up after all those “coming to terms with Nazi guilt” movies from The Wave to The Reader and to some extent The Baader Meinhof Complex. And it’s interesting to note that this and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, another film about a “good” German in the war, were both made by Jewish Americans.
Singer’s film is well made and acted, looks good and, although almost certainly historically simplistic, works well as an entertaining yarn. Von Stauffenberg was an aristocrat, who had made the army his career from his youth, so although Cruise is sometimes a bit stiff, his demeanour suits the role and he carries the film well. Near the beginning of the story he loses an eye, a hand and several fingers on the remaining one while in action in North Africa, which means he spends the rest of the film sporting a rather rakish eye patch and with his hands cosmetically reduced. His glass eye is amusingly used when recruiting General Erich Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) to the plot. Apart from Cruise, the cast is drawn almost entirely from Europe, including a lot of British actors. One could have done with more of the excellent Branagh as Major General Von Treskow, author of a failed earlier plot to blow up Hitler with a bomb hidden in bottles of brandy. Once he’s got Von Stauffenberg on board, Branagh’s character disappears from the story. The “Who’s Who of British actors” all doing a bit of a class act also includes Tom Wilkinson as the two-faced General Fromm, Nighy as the ultimately fatally indecisive General Olbricht and Terence Stamp as Ludvig Beck, a retired general, who resigned his commission before the war in protest against Hitler, while German actors Thomas Kretschmann and Christian Berkel also strut their military stuff. The nasty Nazis aren’t that much in evidence except as extras and with brief appearances from Harvey Friedman as Goebbels and David Bamber as a not very scary Hitler.
The film deals neatly with the language issue early on with Von Stauffenberg writing his diary using a German voice over, which then mixes to Cruise’s own voice in English, making it clear that all the characters are German speakers without us having the “silly accent” issue. It’s a little puzzling the way all these generals appear happy to take orders from a mere colonel — maybe Cruise’s megastar status is a metaphor for Von Stauffenberg’s aristocratic lineage — and the film gets a little bogged down and pedestrian in the middle with the planning of the bomb plot. But it gathers pace and tension with the actual assassination attempt and its aftermath, as the conspirators attempt to turn to their advantage Hitler’s own Valkyrie plan to mobilise the home army. It also effectively handles the challenge posed by the fact that the audience knows from history that the plan has failed but its instigators don’t. There’s a particularly effective moment in the military HQ telex room as the news of the bomb is coming through and the female operators raise their hands one by one in confirmation of Hitler’s supposed death.
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