The Night of the Generals (1967)

User Rating:

7.3/10   

Director:

Anatole Litvak

Writers:

Joseph Kessel (adapted for the screen by) and
Paul Dehn (adapted for the screen by) ...

Release Date:

24 February 1967 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller | War

Tagline:

A unique manhunt across the capitals of Europe... across three decades up to today!

Plot:

The murder of a prostitute in Nazi occupied Warsaw draws Wehrmacht Major Grau into an investigation...

Plot Keywords:

Warsaw | General | Prostitute | Murder | Paris

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Peter O'Toole	...	General Tanz
Omar Sharif	...	Major Grau
Tom Courtenay	...	Corporal Hartmann
Donald Pleasence	...	General Kahlenberge
Joanna Pettet	...	Ulrike
Philippe Noiret	...	Inspector Morand
Charles Gray	...	General von Seidlitz-Gabler
Coral Browne	...	Eleanore von Seidlitz-Gabler
John Gregson	...	Colonel Sandauer
Nigel Stock	...	Otto
Christopher Plummer	...	Field Marshal Rommel
Juliette Gréco	...	Juliette (as Juliette Greco)
Yves Brainville	...	Liesowski
Sacha Pitoëff	...	Doctor (as Sacha Pitoeff)
Charles Millot	...	Wionczek

Also Known As:

La nuit des généraux (France)
Tank Force (Philippines: English title)

Runtime:

148 min

Country:

UK | France

Language:

English | Italian | Spanish | French

Colour:

Colour (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Iceland:16 | Norway:16 | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Spain:18 | Sweden:15 | UK:A (original rating) (cut) | USA:PG | West Germany:16 | UK:15 | Netherlands:MG6

Filming Locations:

Hamburg, Germany

Company:

Horizon Pictures (II)

Trivia:

The character of General Tanz was influenced by the career and reputation of real life Panzer officer Joachim Peiper, the youngest man in the Nazi Army to be make the rank of full colonel (SS-Standartenführer, the direct SS equivalent to an Oberst or full colonel in the German army). Peiper -- a protégé of 'Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler', the head of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the second most powerful man in Germany after Adolf Hitler -- was promoted to the ran at the age of 29. It was Peiper's unit of the Waffen-SS, Kampfgruppe Peiper of the 1st SS Division, Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (German for "Adolf Hitler's Bodyguard Regiment") that was responsible for the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners depicted in the earlier film Battle of the Bulge (1965) (where a character directly based on Peiper was played by Robert Shaw. After the War, he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by the American Occupation Force as the trial had been fraught with illegalities, and he served only 11 years in prison, despite having perpetrated war-crimes on both the Eastern and Western fronts. Peiper -- who was still living at the time the film was shot -- was assassinated at his home in France, likely by French communists, in 1967, the year the movie was released.

Goofs:

Factual errors: In the near beginning of the movie, Grau passes a swastika banner. The swastika is backwards.

Quotes:

General Tanz: It's like the natural functions. Revolting, but inevitable.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Taxidi sta Kythira (1984)

Soundtrack:

SOBRE LAS OLAS

Intriguing failure

Anatole Litvak's The Night of the Generals is a different kind of epic failure, a big-budget WW2 murder-mystery that goes off in all directions and frequently completely forgets its nominal main character, Omar Sharif's wildly miscast Nazi military policeman on the trail of the German general who brutally killed a Polish prostitute. In truth his part is little more than a cameo: he never does any detecting, merely occasionally getting information and a nice dinner from Philippe Noiret's French detective while the plot flashes forward to 1967 or off on a tangent with the plot to assassinate Hitler. The fact that so much screen time is devoted to unlikely Lothario Tom Courtney chauffeuring psychotic General Peter O'Toole around Paris doesn't exactly help the whodunit element, especially with his tendency to come over all epileptic every time he sees Vincent Van Gogh's self-portrait in the 'degenerate art' section of the Louvre.

Sharif isn't the only curious casting: it appears that the Wehrmacht did their recruiting almost exclusively at RADA, with their ranks swelled by cockney character players and their general staff by the better spoken staples of the British film industry. Somehow it just doesn't seem right to see John Gregson playing a Nazi…

The film is either too long or too short. As a mystery it needs to be tighter and more focused on the original investigation; as an epic exploration of Nazi opportunism, both during and after the war, it needs to be longer. As it stands, it does neither approach justice. But, sprawling and devoid of suspense that it is, the film still holds the interest, partially out of it's overly elaborate staging (there is one particularly impressive sequence of the razing of a Polish ghetto that highlights Henri Decae's use of color) and it's over-reaching, misdirected ambition. And just when your attention is ready to stray it will throw in some interesting side-note or line of dialogue, such as Noiret's delicious response to Sharif's statement that one of their generals is a murderer: "Only one?" Sadly the raised question of morality being a simple question of scale - that while mass-murder is admirable in war, individual murder remains abhorrent - gets lost along the way.