Filiming the Generals’ Plot

Films can portray historical narratives in ways even the best descriptive writers only dream about. Almost certainly this is why the events of the July 20 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler continue to fascinate and challenge film-makers. The bomb was planted under the table at Hitler’s headquarters by of all people, Colonel von Stauffenberg, a one-eyed war hero with half a right arm and three fingers missing from his left hand, who could almost come from the script of a Hitchcock thriller. Then, as the coup the staff officers had organised began to go horribly wrong after the bomb failed to kill Hitler, it all seems to turn into an Elizabethan revenge tragedy with suicides, a late-night firing squad and then the torture and murder of thousands of innocents.

At first German film-makers didn’t want to touch the story. Accounts by participants such as Hans Gisevius had appeared as early as 1946, but immediately after the war most Germans despised even peaceful anti-Nazi resisters such as Hans and Sophie Scholl, and regarded the July 20 plotters as traitors. So the first time the bomb plot was portrayed on film was in an adaptation of Desmond Young’s biography The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951) made in America at Twentieth Century Fox and directed by Henry Hathaway with James Mason in the title role. The film concentrates on Rommel’s increasing disillusionment with Hitler’s military incompetence and his gradual involvement in the military coup to replace the Fuhrer. This reflects the origins of the biography itself. When the Rommel family finally recovered his papers they approached the famous British military writer Basil Liddell Hart to edit them. Liddell Hart had already published The Other Side of the Hill, a series of interviews with the key German generals. His treatment of figures like von Rundstedt and Rommel had been sympathetic, so he was a natural choice to introduce and edit the material. Liddell Hart also appears to have introduced the family to Desmond Young, who researched and wrote the biography.

The Desert Fox proved to be a great success. Young had served in the desert and his portrayal of the German general reflected the British Eighth Army’s respect for their formidable adversary. He also interviewed as many participants as he could and skilfully included his own investigations in the narrative. When Twentieth Century Fox bought the rights they cast Young as himself (his voice dubbed by Michael Rennie) and hired Liddell Hart as an uncredited military adviser.

Over fifty years later The Desert Fox remains a remarkable achievement. It begins with a well staged recreation of the Geoffrey Keys commando raid on Rommel’s headquarters followed by a sequence showing Desmond Young’s only encounter with the field marshal. After being captured during one of Rommel’s sudden thrusts across the desert, Young is ordered by a German officer to go out under a white flag to ask the British to stop shelling, as they were likely to kill their own men. Young refuses. Just as the Afrika Korps officer starts to become threatening he is called over by Rommel. “The field marshal says you’re right,” he says on his return. Young, as he puts it in the book, thought that “[Rommel’s] intervention seemed to be worth a salute. I cut him one before I stepped back into the ranks to be driven off into captivity.” It’s a moving scene, especially when you realise that Mason as Rommel is carrying the field marshal’s baton and wearing the goggles he took as spoils of war from Sir Richard O’Connor after the British general had been captured. Briskly narrated by Rennie, the film then traces Rommel’s adventures from El Alamein to his murder after the failure of the bomb plot in late 1944.

Nunnally Johnson’s beautifully crafted script is built around a series of confrontation scenes. First Rommel defies Hitler’s order to stand fast at El Alamein; then he is approached by his old friend, Karl Strolin (Cedric Hardwicke), who persuades him to consider joining the conspiracy against Hitler, with a scathing denunciation of the Fuehrer’s military ineptitude and indifference to the lives of his soldiers. Two deftly written encounters with Leo G. Carroll’s von Rundstedt portray Rommel and his chief’s wary but mutually respectful relationship. These are almost certainly based on The Other Side of the Hill and reflect Liddell Hart’s high regard for the veteran field marshal. (Recent research has revealed that Rundstedt was a somewhat darker figure than he is portrayed here, but the film gets the two men’s relationship just about right.)

There is the inevitable confrontation between the field marshal and Luther Adler’s ranting Hitler that condenses what were in reality a series of increasingly bitter clashes as Rommel tried to get the Fuehrer to face military reality. The final scenes interweave the strafing of Rommel’s car that took him out of the game two days before the coup with the planting of the bomb at the Wolf’s Lair by Eduard Franz’s von Stauffenberg. Mason plays the final scene, when Rommel is brought Hitler’s order to commit suicide, with a stoicism that is profoundly moving and almost certainly accurate.

The Desert Fox doesn’t portray the Nazi atrocities that caused so many of the plotters to oppose Hitler. Rommel is not even shown burning Hitler’s order to shoot commandos out of hand if they are captured. This is less the fault of the film-makers than their advisers. We now know that Liddell Hart was deceived by the German generals and never realised the extent of the army’s collaboration with Hitler. Von Rundstedt, for example, implemented the commando order without question.

After The Desert Fox’s initial success there was the inevitable reaction against the film’s sympathetic portrayal of Rommel and the studio felt compelled to include a harsher portrait in The Desert Rats. He was again played by Mason, this time speaking mainly in German. But with David Fraser’s recent biography of Rommel, Knights Cross, opinion has come full circle and it is now clear that The Desert Fox is one of the last century’s great biopics and was, moreover, the first film to portray the German resistance to Hitler.

By the mid-fifties Germany was coming to see the resistance as washing away at least some of the stains from the Nazi era. The first film on the bomb plot to emerge from the rubble was Der 20. Juli (1955), scripted by Gunther Weisenborn and directed by Falk Harnack, both of whom had been active in the resistance. It has not been seen much outside Germany but according to a post on the internet by Ann Nelson it used a fictional sub-plot to link the staff officers’ conspiracy with the White Rose movement to distribute pamphlets exposing the murder of the Jews. With luck, the film will be included in one of the special editions of the current releases.

The great G.W. Pabst’s It Happened on July 20 (1955) got much wider distribution. I remember seeing it as a schoolboy in 1958 at the old Esquire in Sydney. By then it had acquired an American introduction and a new name, Jackboot Mutiny. (It is still readily available on VHS under that title.) Pabst and his writers, Hans W. Hagen, Gustav Machaty, Jochen Wilke and Werner Zibaso, concentrate exclusively on the events of July 20. After some laboured but well executed exposition scenes we follow Stauffenberg on his flight to Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, see the placing of the bomb under the table, and follow Stauffenberg’s escape and flight back to Berlin, where everything begins to unravel once it’s clear Hitler is not dead.

Pabst’s style is deliberately unadorned, almost clinical, but from my first viewing I recall some impressively stark visuals by cinematographer Kurt Hasse. (The dub on the VHS only approximates the quality of the original nitrate print.) Predictably the film gets the surface of events just about right—expressionist shadows in the corridors of Army Headquarters, troops charging in all directions on the parade ground—but fails to establish the roles of the main protagonists in the coup. The one exception is Bernhard Wicki’s very fine von Stauffenberg. The actor didn’t look much like him but he effortlessly captured the man’s intensity and idealism. Wicki himself shared many of Stauffenberg’s ideals. During the war he was a soldier guarding some French resistance fighters and risked imprisonment to steal food for his charges. Four years after the release of Jackboot Mutiny Wicki was to direct the brilliant anti-war film The Bridge.

Pabst does succeed in portraying the bonds between the pro- and anti-Hitler staff officers which accounted for the lack of ruthlessness that ultimately proved fatal to the plotters. This is the only film I have seen to include von Stauffenberg stopping his aide from shooting General Fromm when, backed by soldiers loyal to Hitler, he resumed command of his headquarters.

When the German telemovie Stauffenberg (German title Operation Valkyrie) (2004) was screened on SBS the same week Valkyrie opened in Australia, Linden Barbour observed that the American film looked like a remake of the earlier work. It was a perceptive comment. There are many resemblances, even similar set-ups. But that can happen when directors use the same locations. The most likely explanation is that both films are based on Peter Hoffmann’s splendid biography Stauffenberg: A Family History, first published in 1992. It is not a great imaginative narrative. Such a work became impossible when Stauffenberg’s diary had to be destroyed to prevent it falling into the hands of the Gestapo. But Hoffmann interviewed most of the surviving participants and discovered an immense amount of evidence in the proceedings of the People’s Court (where so many of the plotters were tried by the loathsome Judge Freisler) as well as the meticulously kept Gestapo interrogations. The author also found sixty letters by von Stauffenberg himself.

Not that the film-makers have been all that anxious to acknowledge their debts to Hoffmann. Stauffenberg credits the director Jo Baier as sole writer. Valkyrie’s writers, Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, and director Bryan Singer do a little better. Their first interviews implied they did all the research themselves but then they admitted to “having a relationship” with Hoffmann. Finally it came out that he had checked the screenplay. Of course screenwriters and directors can be excellent researchers, but they do have a fatal weakness for trying to make everything their own, even sometimes other people’s work. One film-maker (who shall remain nameless) had the effrontery to claim to my face that he had come up with an idea that was explored at length in a book of mine that just happened to be sitting on the shelf behind him.

In any case, the debts to Hoffmann among the writers and directors of Valkyrie and Stauffenberg are obvious to anyone who has read his book. Both films include scenes where von Stauffenberg slips in an artificial eye before important meetings, a detail that comes directly from one of Hoffman’s interviews. The author also clarifies once and for all whether the colonel had an artificial wrist and hand (as shown in the Pabst film) or an empty sleeve (as in most of the American re-creations). In fact Stauffenberg had neither. There were two appointments to have an artificial wrist and hand fitted, both of which had to be cancelled, and on July 20 there was just a missing hand, as is shown in both of the recent films. It also makes for one of Valkyrie’s most striking moments where Tom Cruise’s Stauffenberg gives Tom Wilkinson’s devious Fromm an ironic Nazi salute with his stump.

Jo Baier may not have had the American movie’s budget but his is almost certainly the most complete portrait on film of Stauffenberg’s life and personality to date. The film begins as Stauffenberg shouts “Long live Sacred Germany” as he is gunned down by Fromm’s firing squad, then flashes back to brief scenes showing his initial support for Hitler, and slight anti-Semitism based on a real letter Stauffenberg wrote during the invasion of Poland, heard as a voice-over. This is followed by a powerful sequence where his friend von Tresckow gets him to listen to an anguished survivor’s story of a mass killing. In reality Stauffenberg found out about this sort of atrocity from reports that he saw as a staff officer but the incident could easily have happened and is true to the way so many decent Germans discovered they were being ruled by psychopaths. Stauffenberg’s maiming while fighting in the desert is covered in a spectacular sequence that reproduces more or less exactly the account in the biography.

The events of July 20 are portrayed here in more detail than in any other film I have seen. Included are Stauffenberg’s seeing a body covered by the Fuehrer’s cloak that convinced him Hitler had been killed in the explosion, the late arrival of Field Marshal von Witzleben, who abuses everybody for botching the coup then goes home, and the ghastly two failed suicide attempts by former Chief of the General Staff Ludwig Beck, who would have been the new head of state if the plot had succeeded. There is even a voice-over where Stauffenberg speaks of his vision of a classless new Germany. Above all Baier captures the hysteria and confusion of those terrible final hours as the plot simply fell apart. Visuals are not as lavish as in the American film, but Baier has a keen eye for the sinister pageantry of the Third Reich and elicits fine performances from a superb cast. Sebastian Koch seizes the opportunities in Baier’s script to make von Stauffenberg a full-scale tragic hero whose spiritual and emotional journey evokes pity and terror; a considerable achievement by actor and director.

When Stauffenberg was broadcast on German television in 2004, Peter Hoffmann criticised the film for downplaying Stauffenberg’s bitter opposition to the Holocaust and neglecting the civilian leaders. Personally I found the survivor’s narrative far more effective dramatically than the simple statement about the mass killing of Jews given to Tom Cruise in Valkyrie; but in concentrating on Stauffenberg, Baier does fail to establish the full ramifications of the conspiracy, civilian and military. This certainly cannot be said of Valkyrie.

Valkyrie is the first film to include von Tresckow’s attempt to plant a bomb on Hitler’s plane. The sequence featuring Kenneth Branagh as the would-be assassin is one of the best in the movie and is a reminder that the film was made by the same team that gave us The Usual Suspects. Indeed, the film is shaped like a thriller, with Tom Cruise’s von Stauffenberg being drawn into the conspiracy much as the hero is in a caper movie, with all the main characters clearly established before the film even gets to the events of July 20. Even better, Bryan Singer spells out the details of Operation Valkyrie. There are scenes showing it being rewritten so that, in order to implement the coup after Hitler had been blown up, the conspirators could use a plan originally devised to stabilise German cities if Allied bombing brought about a breakdown of law and order. One particularly tense sequence has Stauffenberg meeting Hitler for the first time when the Fuehrer approves the changes to Operation Valkyrie.

Singer and his writers build up the tension by including Stauffenberg’s first attempt to set off a bomb to kill Hitler, which was called off at the last minute by his immediate superior General Olbricht (Bill Nighy), which prepares us for the same man’s fatal delay on July 20. Valkyrie does not have the passion of the German film even though its rich visuals and the taut understated playing by a fine cast capture the paranoia of life in a dictatorship better than the earlier film. Tom Cruise doesn’t get the opportunities Sebastian Koch had but strikes just the right note of steely resolution to make the character’s late takeover of the conspiracy entirely believable. Particularly good too are Terence Stamp’s gently authoritative Beck, in this version spared his botched suicide, Bill Nighy’s anguished Olbricht and of course Kenneth Branagh’s powerful von Tresckow.

Unlike the Pabst film, where the final tragedy seems inevitable from the outset, Valkyrie makes it clear how close Stauffenberg and the others came to pulling it off. Some mercifully brief scenes of the aftermath underscore the horror of the Nazi reprisals and do overdue justice to the brave men and women who risked their lives and families to try to end a nightmare.

Neil McDonald writes: I am indebted to Susie Riddell of SBS who made it possible for me to see Stauffenberg after I missed the broadcast.