The Huns Who Came in from the Cinematic Cold

Peter o' Toole in 'The Night of the Generals' (1967), which remains vastly underrated despite its trenchant probing of the Nazi psyche.

This week marks yet another anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The dating of the twentieth century’s most cataclysmic war, always a matter of controversy, has definitively begun to shift in both popular and academic histories to underscore its global dimensions. In the past two decades, the war’s historiography has steadily pushed its beginning backwards while widening its geography.

Jonathan Fennell’s recent Collapse: A Global History of the Second World War, 1931–1941, the first volume of a projected trilogy, takes the story back to 1931, when the international order had already begun to come apart.

Earlier, Richard Overy had made much the same case in his magnificent Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931–1945 as did the formidable Robert Lyman in his riveting and highly-acclaimed A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma & Britain: 1941–45 (both came out in 2021). The dating had already been pushed back in more popular narrative histories like Antony Beevor’s The Second World War (2012), that made it abundantly clear the conflict’s dimensions were never adequately captured by the old six-year European frame.

The Second World War is now being understood not as a European quarrel into which the rest of the world was dragged, but as a truly global convulsion, rooted in the crises of empire, nationalism, economics and ideology across several continents.

Cinema has been rather slow to make the adjustment. By cinema, I am specifically speaking of the mainstream Anglophone war film - principally Hollywood and British commercial cinema, whose enormous international reach made it the dominant popular storyteller of the Second World War.

For several years after 1945, the popular war film remained overwhelmingly an Anglo-American affair. Its natural heroes were British and American soldiers and commandos; its preferred landscapes were the deserts of North Africa, the beaches of Normandy, the occupied villages of Western Europe or Anglo-American pluck in Asiatic jungles. The mythology of such films was constructed on the courage, sacrifice and derring-do of British and American soldiers.

From such films as Battleground, Destination Tokyo, Bataan, Objective, Burma! and Wake Island to The Dambusters, Ice Cold in Alex, The Cockleshell Heroes, Ill Met by Moonlight and The Guns of Navarone – all belonging to different genres and having very different virtues, but broadly sharing the same imaginative geography: The war was something where intrepid British and Americans combated Axis tyranny.

Killing Fields

But the savagery and the killing fields of the Second World War was undoubtedly the Eastern Front, which was the gigantic furnace of the conflict, swallowing German and Soviet armies (with more than 35 of the total 60 million casualties from the war) on a scale that dwarfed the fighting in the West.

Yet for much of the history of popular cinema, that immense theatre remained curiously remote. The German soldier was generally a caricature (though not in all films) rather than a character: a figure in grey uniform to be shot, captured or outwitted by the heroes.

The war had certainly been dealt with in the former Axis countries - Germany, both East and West as well as Japan and Italy – in their respective languages. These countries had confronted the catastrophe on screen almost from the war’s end: Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Bernhard Wicki’s The Last Act (1955) were already grappling, in very different ways, with the German experience of the war and its aftermath. Japan produced an extraordinary body of postwar war cinema, from Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956), a melancholy meditation on defeat and moral recovery, to his much more brutal Fires on the Plain (1959) as did Italy in form of Roberto Rossellini’s celebrated trilogy - Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948) - which confronted Fascism, occupation, resistance and the moral desolation left in the war’s wake.

Decision Before Dawn (1951) was one of the earliest and most thoughtful among mainstream English-language films to tackle the German point of view.

There were exceptions in mainstream cinematic, English-speaking commercial war films, though, in representations of the enemy. 1951’s Decision Before Dawn (1951) was an excellent and unusually thoughtful film that featured Oskar Werner in a deeply affecting performance as a German POW recruited by the Americans for espionage and sent back into Germany. The film’s images of a war-ravaged country possess a documentary bleakness. In a different vein, so did The One That Got Away (1957), in which Hardy Krüger played Franz von Werra, the Luftwaffe officer whose repeated attempts to escape Allied captivity gave the familiar British prisoner-of-war picture a German protagonist.

Changing Perspectives

By the 1960s and 1970s, there was a perceptible shift as some notable, big-budget English-speaking war films, featuring major British, European and American stars, were centred on German characters and, increasingly, told from the German point of view.

Producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s epic The Longest Day (1962), based on Cornelius Ryan’s now-classic nonfiction book, was an important landmark, not least because its enormous international cast allowed German officers and soldiers to exist as major characters rather than merely targets.

A most curious undertaking came with The Night of the Generals in 1967 – a woefully underrated film which trenchantly probed the German military mind and the abyss of the Nazi psyche.

Directed by Anatole Litvak and produced by Sam Spiegel, The Night of the Generals was ostensibly a ‘murder mystery,’ adapted from Hans Hellmut Kirst’s savage 1962 novel, which a was black satire on the supposedly celebrated Teutonic virtues of efficiency, discipline and obedience, and on the peculiar insanity that results when an elaborate military machine continues to function perfectly while serving an insane purpose.

The film, a ‘Fritz-the-Ripper’ story and a subsequent manhunt that plays out in the capitals of occupied and postwar Europe, opens in Warsaw in 1942 with the murder of a prostitute. German military intelligence officer Major Grau, played by Egyptian heartthrob Omar Sharif, discovers that the evidence points not towards some anonymous psychopath but towards a German general. Three generals are possible suspects, among them is Peter O’Toole’s ruthless General Wilhelm Tanz, a terrifying young ‘star’ fanatically devoted to Hitler, whose immaculate military bearing conceals an unhinged mind. The other suspects are marvellously played by the acid, though humane Donald Pleasance and the chameleon-like Charles Gray.

Two years later, a similar murder occurs in Paris, which sees the three suspects reunited with the detective, who is doggedly pursuing the trail. A third murder takes place in Dresden after the war, when the Nazi hierarchy has long collapsed but the criminal has not disappeared.

The film is remarkable for its audacity – assembling a stalwart cast of international stars (o’ Toole, Sharif and Tom Courtenay, all David Lean alumna), putting them in German uniforms and presenting them with a problem almost comic in its insolubility. Searching for a murderer among the German High Command is rather like looking for a needle in a garbage dump: identifying the exceptional crime in a military world steeped in criminality, in a machine hurtling itself towards insanity.

O’Toole, reunited with Sharif five years after their signal triumph in Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, chews the scenery with frightening abandon, demonstrating that no one comes remotely close to him in portraying psychotic characters on screen. The scene in which Gen. Tanz encounters Van Gogh’s self-portrait in the Louvre, is one of the film’s great eruptions of madness.

Omar Sharif, gives a performance even better than his turns in Lawrence or Doctor Zhivago. His Major Grau is the perfect foil to o’ Toole’s maniac - a cool, melancholy and sardonic detective pursuing a rational explanation in a world in which rationality has become an increasingly dubious commodity.

Around them are Donald Pleasence, Philippe Noiret and Tom Courtenay, all excellent, giving the film the texture of a literate European political thriller rather than an ordinary war picture whose likes we shall sadly never see today.

The great Maurice Jarre, fresh from his successes with Lean’s epics, provides yet another spectacular score – a marionette-like march and a waltz that perfectly captures the macabre dance of the German military machine.

The film, unsurprisingly, was not a commercial success. I have a particular weakness for The Night of the Generals. When the Second World War bug bit me in adolescence in Pune, I spent the best part of my graduation years haunting the second-hand book exhibitions that used to descend upon the city, looking for Kirst’s novel and a copy of the film. I finally found a copy – an old, battered Fontana edition, in 2004. By then, my search had begun to echo the novel’s manhunt.

If The Night of the Generals looked at the German military establishment through the prism of murder, director Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) was perhaps the first mainstream film to capture the inferno of the German-Soviet war. It was one of the rare mainstream war pictures to put the German infantryman at the centre of the Eastern Front in a muddy, freezing, increasingly senseless struggle for survival.

American James Coburn is perfectly cast as Sergeant Steiner, a hard-bitten veteran whose sole objective is to survive the slaughter. He has lost whatever appetite he may once have possessed for rhetoric and military glory. Maximilian Schell is superb as Captain Stransky, the cowardly Prussian aristocrat obsessed with winning the Iron Cross. 

James Coburn in Sam Peckinpah's brutal and gritty anti-war 'Cross of Iron' (1977).

James Mason and David Warner add further distinction to a formidable cast. Peckinpah’s combat sequences are filmed with his trademark The Wild Bunch style – exploding on screen in the familiar barrage of slow motion, freeze frames with bodies hurled through space. As with Peckinpah, violence becomes an obscene ballet. The bleak film perfectly captures the turmoil and futility of men fighting on afterbelief has long disappeared and the war has become a machine for consuming men who no longer know why they are fighting. Orson Welles, who admired the film, reportedly considered it one of the finest anti-war pictures of its time.

In contrast, The Eagle Has Landed, a thoroughly enjoyable 1976 adventure film, takes the German viewpoint into altogether more fanciful territory. Based on Jack Higgins’ 1975 bestseller, the plot (strikingly similar to the British wartime classic Went the Day Well?) imagines a German commando operation to kidnap Winston Churchill.

Action specialist John Sturges (The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven) turns the improbable premise into a polished late-war caper, while Tom Mankiewicz’s screenplay improves considerably on the novel’s pulp machinery, supplying the proceedings with a generous quantity of wit and irony with lines like “It makes the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a sensible military exercise.”

The stalwart cast has British legend Michael Caine playing the dashing Colonel Kurt Steiner while Canadian Donald Sutherland, with his customary insouciance, is Liam Devlin, the raffish IRA operative recruited for the mission; American heavyweight Robert Duvall is Colonel Radl, the German officer who cooks up the mission while British knight Sir Anthony Quayle essays a harried Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

Donald Pleasence, returning to German uniform, steals the film as Heinrich Himmler, whose sinister charm more than conveys the chilling essence of the real historical monster. The Eagle Has Landed  is perhaps one of the last examples of that old-fashioned late-war adventure film where craft mattered as much as spectacle.

Bolstered by Lalo Schifrin’s exciting score, the film’s most interesting feature is that it allows the German soldier to be the hero without pretending that the regime he serves is heroic. Steiner and his men are portrayed as professionals trapped inside a criminal state.

Taken together, these three films offer a curious little history of Anglophone cinema’s changing relationship with the German soldier.

Despite the cliché, history does not belong exclusively to the victors, although the victors inevitably have a considerable say in how it is remembered. Mainstream cinema, for much of the post-war period, inherited that imbalance. The German soldier was the enemy because the story required one. This is not to downplay the monstrous crimes committed by the Nazi regime, the SS and the Wehrmacht. But once the celluloid German was permitted to become a character by possessing the fears, delusions, vanities, loyalties, absurdities and even professional virtues, the war on screen becomes more complicated, and perhaps, more truthful psychologically. Sometimes, the most revealing way of looking at a war is to stand on the other side of the hill.