The Night of the Generals | |
---|---|
![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Anatole Litvak |
Screenplay by | Joseph Kessel Paul Dehn Gore Vidal [1] (uncredited) |
Based on | The Night of the Generals by Hans Hellmut Kirst and an incident written by James Hadley Chase |
Produced by | Sam Spiegel Georges Lourau Anatole Litvak |
Starring | Peter O'Toole Omar Sharif Tom Courtenay Donald Pleasence Joanna Pettet Philippe Noiret |
Cinematography | Henri Decaë |
Edited by | Alan Osbiston |
Music by | Maurice Jarre |
Production companies | Horizon Pictures Filmsonor |
Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 145 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom France United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $2,400,000 (US/ Canada rentals) [2] |
The Night of the Generals is a 1967 World War II mystery film directed by Anatole Litvak and produced by Sam Spiegel. It stars Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasence, Joanna Pettet, and Philippe Noiret. The screenplay by Joseph Kessel and Paul Dehn was loosely based on the beginning of the 1962 novel of the same name by German author Hans Hellmut Kirst. The writing credits also state the film is "based on an incident written by James Hadley Chase", referring to a subplot from Chase's 1952 novel The Wary Transgressor. [3] Gore Vidal is said to have contributed to the screenplay, but was not credited onscreen. [1] The film's musical score was composed by Maurice Jarre.
The murder of a prostitute, who was also a German agent, in German-occupied Warsaw in 1942 causes Major Grau of the Abwehr to start an investigation. His evidence soon points to the killer being one of three German generals: General von Seidlitz-Gabler; Major General Kahlenberge, von Seidlitz-Gabler's chief of staff; or General Tanz, a highly decorated officer and a favorite of Adolf Hitler. Grau's investigation is cut short by his sudden promotion and transfer to Paris at the instigation of these officers.
There are no further developments in the case until July 1944, when Grau and all three of the generals are in Paris at the same time. The city is a hotbed of intrigue, with senior Wehrmacht officers plotting to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi government. Kahlenberge is deeply involved in the plot, while Gabler is aware of its existence, but sitting on the fence, awaiting the outcome whilst having various extramarital affairs, and Tanz is unaware of the plot and remains totally loyal to Hitler. Tanz has transferred to the SS, and is a Waffen-SS General (SS-Obergruppenführer), in command of the SS-Panzer Division Nibelungen (a fictitious stand-in for the 12th SS Panzer Division).
On the night of 19 July 1944, Tanz orders his driver, Kurt Hartmann, to procure a French prostitute for him. Tanz butchers her and implicates Hartmann, but offers Hartmann the chance to desert, which he accepts. When Grau, who is now a Lieutenant Colonel, learns of the murder, committed in the same manner as the first, he resumes his investigation and concludes that Tanz is the killer. However, his timing is unfortunate, because the very next day the Wehrmacht officers attempt to assassinate Hitler, and, while Grau is accusing Tanz of murder face to face, word arrives that Hitler has survived, so Tanz kills Grau and labels him as one of the conspirators to cover his tracks.
In 1965, the murder of a prostitute in Hamburg draws the attention of Inspector Morand of Interpol, who worked with Grau in 1944 and owes Grau a debt of gratitude for not revealing his connection to the French Resistance during the war. Almost certain the killer of the prostitutes in Warsaw and Paris is at it again, Morand reopens the cold case and zeroes in on Tanz, who was recently released from prison after serving 20 years as a war criminal, as the killer of all three women and the man Grau suspected had framed Hartmann for the murder in Paris. Morand tries to find Hartmann, who is still in hiding, by talking to General Gabler's daughter Ulrike, who was known to be in a relationship with Hartmann during the war, and learns she is estranged from her parents and lives on a farm near Munich.
At a reunion dinner for Tanz's former panzer division, Morand confronts Tanz. When he produces Hartmann, who (apparently) is secretly married to Ulrike, as his witness, Tanz goes into a vacant room and shoots himself.
Both O'Toole and Sharif were hesitant to take their roles in the film, but, feeling they owed it to producer Sam Spiegel for making them international stars with Lawrence of Arabia , they did so anyway. [4] Because they were held to the terms of an old contract agreement, O'Toole's and Sharif's combined salaries were, reportedly, less than that paid to Donald Pleasence. [5]
Gore Vidal, one of the many writers of the script, claimed he urged Spiegel to hire a "new, hot director", but Spiegel, instead, chose the experienced Anatole Litvak, who owned the rights to the novel. [6]
Although the film was a French-British-American international co-production, permission was granted for its first section to be shot behind the Iron Curtain on location in Warsaw, a rarity for a Western-made film at the time. The last scenes of the film were shot in Munich.
Bosley Crowther, in an unenthusiastic review for The New York Times , described the film as "a lurid and mordant screen account of the unmasking of a general officer who likes to disembowel prostitutes." He went on to say:
It is an engrossing exhibition that mainly gives Mr. O'Toole a chance to build up the tensions and the twitches of a sex maniac, with something of the glazed-eyed characteristic of those old vampires who used to suck blood. But once this phase is completed—once we know who the killer is and have made the obvious connection of his war crimes and his private deeds—the excitement of the picture is over. At least, it was for me. [7]
Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 epic biographical adventure drama film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence and his 1926 books Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel, through his British company Horizon Pictures and distributed by Columbia Pictures. The film stars Peter O'Toole as Lawrence with Alec Guinness playing Prince Faisal. The film also stars Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy. The screenplay was written by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson.
The Night of the Long Knives, or the Röhm purge, also called Operation Hummingbird, was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from 30 June to 2 July 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler, urged on by Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate his power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis' paramilitary organization, known colloquially as "Brownshirts". Nazi propaganda presented the murders as a preventive measure against an alleged imminent coup by the SA under Röhm – the so-called Röhm Putsch.
Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens was a German-Austrian stage and film actor. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens. He was well known for playing Ernst Udet in Des Teufels General. His English-language roles include James Bond villain Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Éric Carradine in And God Created Woman (1956), and Professor Immanuel Rath in The Blue Angel (1959).
Josef "Sepp" Dietrich was a German politician and SS commander during the Nazi era. He joined the Nazi Party in 1928 and was elected to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic in 1930. Prior to 1929, Dietrich was Adolf Hitler's chauffeur and bodyguard.
The Blomberg–Fritsch affair, also known as the Blomberg–Fritsch crisis, was the name given to two related scandals in early 1938 that resulted in the subjugation of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) to Adolf Hitler. As documented in the Hossbach Memorandum, Hitler had been dissatisfied with the two high-ranking military officials concerned, Werner von Blomberg and Werner von Fritsch, regarding them as too hesitant with the war preparations he demanded. As a result, a marriage scandal and a manufactured accusation of homosexuality were used to remove Blomberg and Fritsch, respectively.
Heinz Reinefarth was a German SS commander during World War II and government official in West Germany after the war. During the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 his troops committed numerous atrocities. After the war, Reinefarth became the mayor of the town of Westerland, on the isle of Sylt, and member of the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag. Polish demands for extradition were never accepted, and Reinefarth was never convicted of any war crime.
The Vistula–Oder offensive was a Red Army operation on the Eastern Front in the European theatre of World War II in January 1945. The army made a major advance into German-held territory, capturing Kraków, Warsaw and Poznań. The Red Army had built up their strength around a number of key bridgeheads, with two fronts commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Konev. Against them, the German Army Group A, led by Colonel-General Josef Harpe, was outnumbered five to one. Within days, German commandants evacuated the concentration camps, sending the prisoners on their death marches to the west, where ethnic Germans also started fleeing. In a little over two weeks, the Red Army had advanced 480 kilometres (300 mi) from the Vistula to the Oder, only 69 kilometres (43 mi) from Berlin, which was undefended. However, Zhukov called a halt, owing to continued German resistance on his northern flank (Pomerania), and the advance on Berlin had to be delayed until April.
Howard Vernon, born Mario Walter Lippert, was a Swiss stage and film actor who appeared in films by Jean-Pierre Melville, Sacha Guitry, Fritz Lang, Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard and Jesús Franco.
Siegfried Carl Alban Rumann, billed as Sig Ruman and Sig Rumann, was a German-American character actor known for his portrayals of pompous and often stereotypically Teutonic officials or villains in more than 100 films.
The Wola massacre was the systematic killing of between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles in the Wola neighbourhood of the Polish capital city, Warsaw, by the Waffen-SS and fellow Axis collaborators in the Azerbaijani Legion, as well as the mostly-Russian RONA forces, which took place from 5 to 12 August 1944. The massacre was ordered by Heinrich Himmler, who directed to kill "anything that moves" to stop the Warsaw Uprising soon after it began.
Charles Gray was an English actor and voice artist who was well known for roles including the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever; Dikko Henderson in a previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice; Sherlock Holmes's brother Mycroft Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; and The Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Günter Meisner was a German film and television character actor. He is remembered for his several cinematic portrayals of Adolf Hitler and for his role as Arthur Slugworth in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. He was fluent in four languages and appeared in many English-language, German-language and French-language films.
Wilhelm Emanuel Burgdorf was a German general during World War II who served as a commander of the 529th Infantry Regiment and staff officer in the German Army. In October 1944, Burgdorf assumed the role of the chief of the Army Personnel Office and chief adjutant to Adolf Hitler. In this capacity, he played a key role in the forced suicide of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Burgdorf committed suicide inside the Führerbunker on 2 May 1945 at the conclusion of the Battle of Berlin.
Hans Heinrich von Twardowski was a German film actor.
Wolfgang Zilzer was a German-American stage and film actor, often under the stage name Paul Andor.
Josef Albert Meisinger, also known as the "Butcher of Warsaw", was an SS functionary in Nazi Germany. He held a position in the Gestapo and was a member of the Nazi Party. During the early phases of World War II Meisinger served as commander of Einsatzgruppe IV in Poland. From 1941 to 1945 he worked as liaison for the Gestapo at the German embassy in Tokyo. He was arrested in Japan in 1945, convicted of war crimes and was executed in Warsaw, Poland.
Kurt Katch was a Polish film and television actor. He appeared in Quiet Please, Murder, The Purple V, The Mask of Dimitrios, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, among many others. Katch appeared in the first James Bond story filmed in 1954 for the Climax! TV show. Katch died from cancer and is interred at Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.
The Night of the Generals: A Novel is a thriller novel by German writer Hans Hellmut Kirst, published in 1962.
For the composer, see Christian Hartmann (composer).
Helmuth Groscurth was a German staff and Abwehr officer in the Wehrmacht and a member of the German resistance. As an intelligence officer he was an early proponent of the Brandenburgers, commanded unconventional warfare operations in the Sudetenland, and was an active conspirator against Hitler's agenda. He was later reassigned to the regular army following his criticism of war crimes committed by German forces in Poland. After commanding an infantry battalion in the invasion of France he assumed a variety of staff roles. He was involved in the events of the Bila Tserkva massacre where he attempted to avert the killing of Jewish children.