Poetry with Red Flags

Rating: 8/10 (14 February 2010)

There will be a lot of specific spoilers in this review, but hiding the plot in an historically-based movie is like trying not to tell that the boat went down in "Titanic." This household is made of of a couple of film geeks, and one lay expert in German 20th-century military history, so you're warned.
I perked up when the film began with a translation of the original Hitler Oath running across the screen (search "Hitler_Oath" on Wikipedia). The oath was central to the hesitation caused in the officer corps after the Attentat (attempted assassination). The director had my attention.
In our household, we enjoy Tom Cruise as an actor. I personally think he's funny, in a very restrained, rather sly, self-referential way. He's also extremely tightly wound. Directors who seem to know how to use him cast him to play very tightly-wound characters, and are not disappointed. Von Stauffenberg was a badly-wounded man, with all the delayed stress, pain and frustration that entails, and he yearned desperately to stop his beloved country from falling any further down the cliff it had already flung itself off of. He was a traditional German officer, a class that had been trained in extreme self-restraint, right down to their posture ("Haltung."). I expect any actor playing him to be very upright in physical and moral stance, but to be barely repressing rage and pain. Who better than Cruise?
Moments of humor include Cruise throwing his eyeball into Eddie Izzard's drink to get his attention (We didn't recognize Izzard until we saw his name in the credits, and madly hunted the DVD to get another look at his performance. With no more disguise than a pair of glasses and a flat expression, Izzard hid in plain sight. What a chameleon!) Another moment is when von Stauffenberg turns and snaps the Hitler Salute at Tom Wilkinson (Fromm). Of course Fromm made a huge mistake; a man missing a hand and most of his fingers would no more have been expected to salute than he would have been expected to hurry while changing his shirt. Besides, saluting Hitler with a handless arm was an outright insult. Von Stauffenberg more or less told Fromm to go have intercourse with himself. Loudly.
Marvelous minor performances include the officer of the reserve army, with his frustrated sigh of "Assemble the men," and his snapped, "WE're the coup, you idiot!" And the sergeant at the Wolf's Lair, who perfectly mimes Military Fear that causes him to make a terrified decision not to touch that empty telephone. His performance is accurate, right down to the nervous head-shake. Watch for the whole crew of the teletype message-transfer center, trying desperately not to get themselves -- and their families -- killed if they make the wrong choice (I was a military teletypist in the '70's and it was all spookily familiar, right down to the message-checking and the sound of the raving keys).
I've studied the German army in the period intensively, and I can say the sets, costumes, etc., were beautifully done. The use of the red swastika flags reflect the original use of them in the Third Reich, whose artists and film designers knew what would look good on the screen. Von Stauffenberg's wife is portrayed as faultlessly fashionable. Germany had conquered France, but the French fashion industry refused to be crushed, as a form of very French protest. With access to this industry, wives of high-caste German military officers were expected to maintain a highly fashionable appearance as a form of patriotism; to have appeared in old or cheap dresses would have been to accuse the regime of being unable to keep up the populations's surface standard of consumerism.
The music was more Stravinsky than the thin and upbeat love-songs and military marches that were allowed in the Third Reich, but at least we're allowed samples of those original tunes. It would have been fun to hear some of the fake swing from the official jazz bands that were supported to compete with Allied broadcasts.
We know how this would end, but we were on the edges of our seats (well, couch and rocking-chair) all the way through. There was a real attempt to show the terror Germans lived while under this government, although it might have been more real to show how the regime began to insanely clean house, killing thousands of people in and out of the officer corps. As a World War One Austrian soldier, Hitler hated the German officer corps, and wouldn't have held back if he'd had the chance to get them, even as he cleaned out the very soldiers who fought the war. Not the first -- or last time -- personal or political considerations would cripple an army.
I could bore for England about the history and how it relates to this movie; again, excellent research.
The cute use of the MGM logo, small and silver, at the end of the credit roll: it looks exactly like the cockade, oak leaves and silver strap on a German officer's cap. Yes, we got the joke, so whoever pulled it, it wasn't in vain.
Then again...the MGM lion logo came before the modern German cap design. We've been comparing the logo and the cockade design more and more. And remembering the Third Reich hired artists. Who can always get past censors with a little clever design. Did "Valkyrie" point out an old joke the artists pulled on the Nazis a long time ago? It would be fun to think so.