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Whistle Stopper - The Night of the Generals
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $57.69
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Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Donald Pleasence, Joanna Pettet
Directed By: Anatole Litvak
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786303451534
Format: Color
ISBN: 6303451535
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Release Date: 1996-08-06
Running Time: 148
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: 1967-02-24
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: As fascinating as nasty gossip, but keep your finger on the fast-forward button
Comment: German Army officer Grau, a colonel in Wehrmacht Intelligence, is talking to a French policeman, Inspector Morand, in Paris. The year is 1944. For two years Grau has been investigating the psychopathic murder of a prostitute that took place in Warsaw. The suspects are three Wehrmacht general officers. Says Inspector Morand as he wonders why Grau is so persistent in his investigation, "Murder is the occupation of generals."
"Then let us say," Grau replies, "what is admirable on the large scale is monstrous on the small. Since we must give medals to mass murderers, why not give justice to the small entrepreneur."
The Night of the Generals is a mess. It sprawls all over the place, from Poland to Paris to Germany; from 1942 to 1944 to 1963. We have everything from warfare in cities to the 1944 attempt on Hitler's life to the fiction of Rommel's part in the Fuhrer plot, to the rise of neo-Nazism in post-war Germany, to definitions of decadent art. We see the tenderness of young love and the sexual sleaze of frozen-faced sadism. What on earth makes this two-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute movie...if you use the fast-forward button often enough...so much fun?
For me, it's two things. First, it's the schadenfreude-like satisfaction of watching so many members of the elite about to get theirs, all in the context of the rancid Nazi stew of ambitious senior military officers and the morally corrupt German high society that fed on each other. When you combine that with all those strutting uniforms with red collar tabs and red stripes down the pants, black batons, leather coats, boots up to the knees, it's hard to remember you're watching the leaders of a brutally effective army and not members of a Ruritanian farce. I wonder who the Nazis hired to design their uniforms?
The second thing is the skill of the secondary actors. More about them in a moment.
The three generals the then Major Grau (Omar Sharif) in Warsaw suspects of murder are General Tanz (Peter O'Toole), youngest division general in the Wehrmacht and a brutally effective general; General von Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray), a senior officer in Warsaw who lives well, appreciates his lineage and who doesn't take chances. He has his wife and daughter with him. The wife (Coral Browne) is an even more dedicated Nazi than her husband. And there is Major General Klaus Kahlenberg (Donald Pleasence), von Seidlitz-Gabler's chief of staff. He seems at times to be human, drinks probably too much, and as we learn later, is up to his ears in conspiracy.
There is no doubt as to the killer once one looks even cursorily at the casting of the three generals. But then the murder of the Polish prostitute, repeated by the murder of a Paris prostitute in 1944 when the three generals have been assigned to Paris and meet Grau again, is hardly the point of the movie. The Night of the Generals is designed, I think, simply to let us look at corruption and destiny in high Nazi places. It doesn't succeed because the movie takes on so many things it wants to cover. Still, it's always good to see those who think they are our betters slip into the mud.
As the lead suspect and star of the movie, Peter O'Toole playing General Tanz gives one of the weirdest and poorest performances in a career full of weird performances. O'Toole gives us a fugitive from Madame Tussaud's, complete with waxy face, staring eyes, slightly open mouth and all the subtlety of a sharp knife. The performance is so odd and exotic that I felt nothing for the character, bad or good; only the wonder that the director Anatole Litvak didn't pinch his cheek to see if O'Toole were alive. If it weren't for the inherent morbid fascination with Nazi high doings and the skill of some of the other actors, O'Toole would have, in my opinion, sunk this ship.
But what first-rate actors there are: Donald Pleasence, so insignificant looking and yet so subtle and skilled an actor. The movie becomes interesting every time he shows up. Charles Gray, not yet in the really hammy part of his acting career, does a wonderful job as the self-serving, shrewd fence sitter. Coral Browne excelled in imperious and selfish members of the upper crust and she doesn't let us down as a Nazi. Philippe Noiret as Inspector Morand, who finally in 1965 is able to repay a debt to Grau and bring a psychopath to justice, is just fine. Even Tom Courtenay as a German corporal does an interesting job as a young man who comes into contact with Tanz and pays a price. At first I thought he was miscast, but then I realized he was the only major member of the cast who seemed normal.
Great chunks of the movie could have been edited out with no one noticing...but then two-thirds of the movie would have been on the cutting room floor. The Night of the Generals is like nasty gossip, fun at first, eventually tiresome...but then you wouldn't mind a little more. Just keep your finger on the fast forward button.
The Region 2 DVD I have from AmazonUK is anamorphic wide screen, but the two sides of the picture have been cut off, at least for the credits. It is not this Region 2 version. Picture quality is nothing special but adequate. There are no extras. There are chapter stops but no menu index for them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A war movie and mystery (kind of) in one
Comment: A German officer looking into the murder of a prostitute in Warsaw discovers that the suspect has to be one of three generals stationed in the city. before he can do anything about it he finds himself in Paris. The same generals wind up there as well, but at least one of them is involved in a conpiracy to kill Hitler. The movie goes on and it is fascinating to see how the entire thing plays out.
I am waiting for a good version of this video to be available on DVD. Once it is I will make sure to add it to my collection.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is Peter O'Toole's best acting performance.
Comment: I don't think it possible to think of this movie as either a period piece or a re-hash of the "hate the Nazi" World War Two screen novel. It goes way beyond that. I believe that Peter O'Toole is at the peak of his talent in this film. I only know of one actor who was gifted at portraying men who were homicidally/mentally ill and that was Humphrey Bogart in the "Caine Mutiny" and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre".
O'Toole is so good in this part that all of the other actors in the movie have to come up to his level and that makes it one of the better acted plays of the latter part of the 20th Century.
Charles Gray and Coral Browne play the typical man and wife team out to make it to the top of whatever organization they work and play in. The way they play off the Hitler loving O'Toole with their "loyalty statements to Uncle Adolf" is only as remarkable as their attempt to pawn off their daughter (Joanna Pettet) to this SS monster, without once reverting to the tried and true "Heil Hitlers".
Even the bit actors come onto the scene with credible performances, such as Nigel Stock who rushes into an office to find that O'Toole's character has murdered Omar Sharif and after an `eye opening' expression on his face suddenly accepts the fact that his boss has just committed another murder, then dutifully and unquestioningly carries the body outside in the foray!
The interaction between Donald Pleasence and Tom Courtenay seemed strange at first, and was probably bordering on homosexual. Though at the time that would have been hard to swallow at Columbia Pictures, never-the-less it was in the movie. Perhaps an acknowledgment that this film by Sam Spiegel was produced in Europe.
All of this great script writing, superlative acting, and excellent photography combined with great location shots are all surrounded by probably one of the best adapted music scores in motion picture history. Academy Award winner Maurice Jarre who wrote the score also did all of the David Lean Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago scores.
When you see O'Toole's face when he sneaks in to look at art declared illegal by the Third Reich to look at Van Gogh's impressionist self portrait painting, minus the artist's ear, you get the message loud and clear: Hang on to your seat while watching this movie because you are about to take a psycho roller coaster ride into madness!
Customer Rating:
Summary: an overlooked pleasure
Comment: This movie is one that should be seen after reading the Hans Helmut Kirst novel on which it is based. The novel goes into depth on the three different types of generals portrayed and how each type of general betrayed the country by serving Hitler. The old monocled Prussian aristocrat, the middle class techician played by Donald Pleasance and of course the incomparable O'Toole as the Nazi fanatic.The novel is less a whodunnit than historical ruminations with the murder as a backdrop. I think many of the best things in the novel don't make it into the movie, while many ridiculous bits of dialogue do.
The end of the novel is particularly ironic because Tans the former National Socialist fanatic ends up working for the East German communists, not celebrating the old days at a ridiculous reunion.
I enjoy O'Toole immensely,but agree that Sharif's character is not credible.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A fascinating failure
Comment: Much derided on its initial release despite reuniting the Lawrence of Arabia team of Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif (who share little screen time) and producer Sam Spiegel, Anatole Litvak's The Night of the Generals is a different kind of epic failure, and much more interesting than many a success of its day.
Clumsily ripped off by the Vietnam movie Saigon/Off Limits, it's 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 the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 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.
No extras, but the 2.35:1 transfer does justice to Decae's photography.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Long (148 minutes) military mystery set among the high command of Nazi Germany in occupied Poland and elsewhere in the Third Reich. A prostitute in wartime Warsaw has been brutally murdered and a German military investigator narrows his field of suspects to three German generals. But the war--and the sense of preening Prussian arrogance--interferes with his investigation, even as he begins to home in on the killer. Moodily sinister atmosphere and a strong cast (Peter O'Toole, Tom Courtenay, Omar Sharif, Christopher Plummer) can't overcome a plodding pace and a tendency to digress. --Marshall Fine
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