The Night of the Generals (1967)
Part giallo style murder mystery part adaptation of the events of Operation Valkyrie. This star studded mystery is an original war drama. Set in Poland and Paris, the bulk of the film concentrates on sadistic German General Tanz, played by a brilliant Peter O' Toole, a general who simply destroys whole neighbourhoods of Warsaw with his Panzer division when the resistance takes a pot shot at him on a city tour. He's one of three generals who can't reveal their whereabouts when a general was identified, or at least his trouser legs were, when a prostitute was brutally murdered. Omar Sharif's Major Grau investigates the murder as the girl was a German spy and vital to stopping the Polish resistance.
The Night of the Generals is a different sort of war film. There's no action barring Tanz's destruction of a Polish street. All the way through it has a vibe of decadence similar in ways to Cabaret(1972) and i'm sure it influenced the Eurocine films of the late 70's such as Fraulein Devil and Special Train for Hitler. It's this decadence, the feeling that the Germans can get away with anything that dominates the film making the whole thing quite seedy. O'Toole's seemingly detached from reality performance just adds to the grime.
The film has a terrific cast. Along with the aforementioned O'Toole and Sharif there's Charles Gray, Donald Pleasence, Christopher Plummer, Gordon Jackson, and Joanna Pettet among a cast of familiar faces from British film. As the plot unfolds and it transpires that two of the generals are involved in Valkyrie - the plot to kill Hitler as the Allies moved into Germany - then this takes centre stage over the giallo procedural aspects of tracking down the killer.
At two hours eighteen minutes the film is a touch too long. A good twenty minutes could easily have been shaved off and no one would notice, but on the whole The Night of the Generals is a nice blend of genres and an excellent piece of cinema.
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