Point Man For The Bomb Plot Against Hitler

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2011)

Tom Cruise is one of those actors who can't shake a youthful image. When one thinks of him, one thinks of All The Right Moves, Top Gun, even Taps as the young brat packer. Of all the young players of the Eighties labeled the Brat Pack, Cruise has had the most staying power by far.
In Valkyrie, Cruise holds his own with some classically trained players from across the pond like Terrence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson. These folks in varying degrees participate in the plot named Operation Valkyrie to assassinate Adolph Hitler and hopefully bring about a short conclusion of the war.
Working against them was the unconditional surrender policy agreed to by the Allies. Everyone well remembered Hitler's skillful use of the betrayal issue that came about in that interregnum between the Armistice and the Versailles Treaty. The Allies wanted Germany beaten with no doubt about it this time around.
And they would have had to have bagged a whole gang of them, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Bormann etc. for it to work. Nobody on the Allied side would have dealt with any of these specimens. In fact when they did break the policy and negotiate a surrender with Marshal Pietro Badoglio and due to circumstances to lengthy to go into here, the objective was not accomplished and we had a yard by yard war up the Italian peninsula instead of a quick surrender.
Cruise let's face it is not a brat packer any more. In fact he's roughly the age that Stauffenberg was when he became the point man for bombing on July 20, 1944. He even looks a bit like him. There's also a trace of the German aristocratic air about him that Stauffenberg was. Claus von Stauffenberg did come from an old Catholic aristocratic family with a military tradition who saw the Nazis as parvenus. But it was hard to argue with Hitler's early military success, especially for a military man.
The performance really to watch here is that of Tom Wilkinson who is a really oily individual as General Fromm who was trying so hard to keep himself in good with both sides so he could come out on top. As for what happened to him, watch a very worthwhile film to find out.