Well done, Tom Cruise! History is safe in your hand.

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 2009)

I expected to be a little disappointed by this film but, to the contrary, I was greatly impressed by its dramatic impact and its deft handling of some pretty complex material. Balancing entertainment and enlightenment is always tricky and this film succeeds in both essentials. It is an honourable addition to the filmography of Resistance to Nazism which now includes Georg Elser, Sophie Scholl, Defiance, Rosentrasse, Amen, Edelweiss Pirates, Escape from Sobibor, and Swing Kids. These very different films tell important stories.
I have been a Stauffenberg fan since my teens and have taught the July Bomb Plot to adolescents for nearly 40 years. So I followed the ups and downs of the Cruise enterprise with some interest. Ownership of the story belongs neither to the Stauffenberg family, nor to the German people but to us all. It is clear that an American film star's attempt to make a feature film out of this Plot-which-could-have-changed-History has ruffled a lot of feathers.
Some Germans appear indignant that it has been left to a bunch of foreigners to make the first blockbuster about Stauffenberg. The Stauffenberg family worry that Cruise does not portray their Claus as they remember him. I may grumble that the actors who played Keitel and Witzleben were too short or that the film's depiction of Fromm demanding a Hitler salute from the stump of Stauffenberg's right arm was a piece of cheap theatricality. It would have been nice if they could have got Bruno Ganz to play the same Hitler as he did in 'Downfall'. Goring was poorly portrayed in both films.
However, all this misses the real point. Does the Cruise film sacrifice historical authenticity to the demands of box-office entertainment? I would say not. If anything, it errs in the other direction. Action scenes are kept to a minimum. There are several long, slow scenes. The story of ex-politicians and retired generals conspiring to overthrow the Nazi state is by its nature a very complex one to show on screen. However, it had to be tackled for the film to make sense. Beck, Goerdeler, Witzleben et al are shown but their characters and roles are not fully explained. This is to be regretted but I think that endeavouring to portray all the key plotters would have spoiled the film's pace and dynamic.
The film succeeds in all the key essentials. The technical details of the bombs used to try and kill Hitler and the reasons their failure are fully explained; the prevarications of Olbricht and Fromm, the role of Fellgiebel in closing down communications, the moral dilemma posed by treason in wartime, and, above all, the sheer magnitude of mounting a coup against a totalitarian state are all fully explored. The film shows the organisational successes of the plotters and stresses Hitler's survival as the main reason for the coup's failure. Otto Remer's talk with Goebbels and Hitler brings the coup to an end and the type of death meted out to the protagonists is accurately, if not comprehensively, depicted.
Of course, one could make this film in many different ways. A shot of Hitler staggering out of wreckage with his clothes in tatters or one of him showing Mussolini how Providence had delivered him from certain death would both make good cinema. However, the decision not to show Hitler escaping was the correct one as it would have undermined the dramatic narrative of the plotters putting their plans into motion.
Hitler does not dominate this film but there is a nice reference to his strict non-smoking vegetarianism. Someday History will have to make up its mind whether or not these were real virtues or merely the banal excesses of an obsessive, mean-spirited, petty bourgeois autodidact.
The decision to place Stauffenberg at the centre of the drama was correct even though this over-emphasises his role in the wider Plot. Cruise shows cultural sensitivity in his portrayal of a German hero. Stauffenberg's moral detestation of Nazism is well-documented and Cruise provides a sympathetic and convincing portrait of the man.
Critics have cast Stauffenberg as a convinced Anti-Semite, aghast at the murder of Jews but not at their exclusion from German society. As an upper-class Catholic, he would not have been immune to the religious Anti-Semitism propagated by his Church for 2000 years. Nazi Anti-Semitism was different and not to his taste. Most heroes have flaws. Horatio Nelson's strong support for Black Slavery and the Slave Trade has almost been written out of History. Both these gentlemen lived in cultures deeply ingrained with racist attitudes.
Likewise, the nationalist-conservative mind-set of the conspirators has long been criticised. Their desire for Germany to return to its 1914 borders with all that implied for the Poles is clearly documented.
Clearly, these plotters may have been fallen angels but they were the only angels to hand. Their force was the only one available to overthrow the Third Reich.
The decision to use written German throughout the film was a brave one, as was the avoidance of stereotypical German accents by British actors. Cruise makes little effort to disguise his American accent but this does not detract from his performance. These language decisions clearly help to make the audience more sympathetic to the main protagonists.
Well done, Tom Cruise! You have made an important event accessible to a wider audience. The failure of this plot would cost many lives as the war dragged on needlessly to its inevitable and sordid conclusion. This fact was not lost on my mother-in-law who watched the film with me. Her youngest brother Freddy was a British tank man killed in April 1945 at the age of 19. Success for Stauffenberg offered life to millions.