Night of the Generals (1967)

Night of the Generals (1967)

Liesowski: But what happens if the murderer really is a general?

Major Grau: What happens? Well, justice is blind, my dear Inspector. Justice cannot see the red stripe or the gold braid, but justice can sometimes hear the cry of a murdered woman.

There are plenty of WW2 movies around, some great and some not so great, some overrated and others underrated.  Today’s movie is one of those good solid underrated films based in WW2 which also happens to have some big names under its collar.  It’s an engrossing story that has a historical event weaved into its plot which also makes it very interesting.  

Germany has just taken over Poland and in 1942 a prostitute, who doubled as a German agent, is murdered in a hotel.  As the murderer walks from the scene he is spotted from by a fearful eye looking out through the crack of a door but all the witness sees is someone dressed in a German uniform which has a red stripe down the side of the trousers.  The uniform of a German general.  

Major Grau (Omar Sharif) of the German Intelligence is sent to investigate the murder and as the time reveals and not all is quite as it seems.  The search narrows down to three possible suspects, General Kahlenberge (Donald Pleasance), General von Seidlitz-Gabler (Charles Gray) and General Tanz (Peter O’Toole) and they all have something to hide on the evening of the murder.

I like a bit of authenticity in movies, so if the characters are German they should be speaking German or at the very least have a strong German accent.  Sadly, as three the main actors come from England they talk with a prominent English accent (especially Peter O’Toole and Charles Gray) which in some way takes some believability out of it but I understand why they would do that as they would either need to learn German or hire German speaking actors and the audience at the time may not like the idea of having subtitles on an American release film.  That aside the movie is quite well done.  Not a masterpiece but just a good ol whodunit film with good acting and good story.  It’s not so much a WW2 film with battles and so on, but the film just takes place during this period and also brings up an important historical event that a more recent Hollywood movie also looked at, which adds to the interest of the film if you’re a WW2 movie fan.

I have the Australian DVD release of the film (cover to the left) but the review was based off the High Definition digital version available through Google Play (no doubt the same as the iTunes version) which, visually, is somewhat better than the DVD.  Both are displayed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio with 2 channel stereo audio.  The DVD is not bad but lacks detail whilst I suspect the HD version is sourced from a new remaster of the film and therefore adds extra detail and punch in the colour department especially reds which is an important colour within the film.  There is a Bluray available from the U.S. company “Twilight Time” and from what I gather it uses the same new transfer of the film used with the HD digital copies so it’s very pleasing to watch visually but the Bluray will take the sharpness/detail of the film a notch higher than the digital copies but Twilight Time only produce 300 copies of the Bluray and sells for USD29.95 which makes it a very expensive Bluray when converted to Aussie dollars.  

Overall it’s a very enjoyable movie with some good performances with that WW2 flavour to it and well worth seeing though you may want to either hire the movie (digital HD for the best reasonable cost) or just buy the DVD.  For Australians it’s not really worth paying about AUD50 for the Twilight Time Bluray unless you really, really, really like it (I really do not like recommending digital versions over hard copy discs but at those costs we are having our arms twisted).

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