War Gone Wrong

The Night of the Generals is a murky mystery story of Nazi Germany. Based on a novel by Hans Hellmut Kirst, the film focuses on three officers who were involved in the abortive 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. One of them is also a latter-day Hans the Ripper who murders and mutilates a prostitute. After the three comes Major Grau (Omar Sharif), an intelligence officer whose magnificent obsession is justice. Outranked by the generals and outflanked by the Allies, he is determined that in the midst of the war's mass murders the wanton killing of one innocent woman shall not go unpunished. Grau at last traps the murderer (Peter O'Toole), only to be killed himself. True justice does not come until long after the war, when the guilty general is confronted with the evidence and shoots himself.

As the villain, O'Toole exhibits the now celebrated twitching lip and glazed stare that some viewers have seen too often--when he played Lawrence of Arabia, Lord Jim, and Becket's king. Omar Sharif, an Egyptian by birth, is German only by permission of the makeup and wardrobe departments, which have vainly tried to Teutonize him with severe pencil lines around the mouth and a crisp military tunic. Only Donald Pleasence, playing one of the generals who stays one jump ahead of the Sharif, infuses his role with a fresh mixture of blood and irony.

What attacks Generals fatally and finally is neither its cliche-ridden script nor its miscast stars, but the gemuetlich approach of Director Anatole Litvak. The slick editing and the bright, bold colors seem less to polish the picture than to varnish it, and they cannot cover the film's faults. The waifs of German-occupied Warsaw are too plump and well padded, the armies seem too clean and well mannered. And the officers are too self-consciously symbolic of Germany's decadence and decency, grossness and grace. Somewhere beneath it all is a plausible plot and a powerful picture gone wrong.

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