I Haff a Cunning Plan
Just to start with, this
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-readmits-holocaustdenying-priest-to-the-church-1515339.html
is one of the reasons I won't shut up about organised religion - in this case, the leaders of the Catholic church. This, of course, is the Pope who is well on the way to making Pius XII, who was on good terms with Hitler (who never renounced his own Catholicism), into a Saint.
This leads nicely into what I wanted to talk about, which is the movie Valkyrie.
There are real problems with adapting the July '44 plot to kill Hitler and take over the Reich. For a start, most people who go to see it will already know that this does not end well. It's hard, even for Bryan Singer, to drum up excitement when the audience is just waiting to learn what went wrong. It's a sure way to lose tension, particularly when your script details so many complications it begins to look like Mission Impossible IV. (I'm tempted to say only Craig Garrison could have pulled it off, but that's my mediafan background talking.) If you know nothing about the historical background - not to mention the organisation of the Third Reich - you lose track and start noticing things like the concrete block paving that is incredibly out of period. It also soon becomes clear that if one German officer has any brains, the whole thing is going to fall apart anyway - so you sit around waiting for it to happen and it eventually does. The one person who seemed to have a contingency plan was Goebbels... a rather triffic cameo by Harvey Friedman.
That said, Tom Cruise does his best with Von Stauffenberg (while the script glides rather gently over the fact that he was an authoritarian aristocrat, like most of the others who plotted to kill Hitler - and a committed Catholic so probably a better, if not very good, candidate for sainthood than Pius) and he is surrounded by great British character actors acting their socks off - but characters we know nothing at all about.
It's a decent movie, but you see it for the acting, and the handsome, accurate settings. It's too simplistic and too glossy, but Von Stauffenberg and his group were genuine heroes. If it has something to teach is that complicated plots don't work in real life...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-readmits-holocaustdenying-priest-to-the-church-1515339.html
is one of the reasons I won't shut up about organised religion - in this case, the leaders of the Catholic church. This, of course, is the Pope who is well on the way to making Pius XII, who was on good terms with Hitler (who never renounced his own Catholicism), into a Saint.
This leads nicely into what I wanted to talk about, which is the movie Valkyrie.
There are real problems with adapting the July '44 plot to kill Hitler and take over the Reich. For a start, most people who go to see it will already know that this does not end well. It's hard, even for Bryan Singer, to drum up excitement when the audience is just waiting to learn what went wrong. It's a sure way to lose tension, particularly when your script details so many complications it begins to look like Mission Impossible IV. (I'm tempted to say only Craig Garrison could have pulled it off, but that's my mediafan background talking.) If you know nothing about the historical background - not to mention the organisation of the Third Reich - you lose track and start noticing things like the concrete block paving that is incredibly out of period. It also soon becomes clear that if one German officer has any brains, the whole thing is going to fall apart anyway - so you sit around waiting for it to happen and it eventually does. The one person who seemed to have a contingency plan was Goebbels... a rather triffic cameo by Harvey Friedman.
That said, Tom Cruise does his best with Von Stauffenberg (while the script glides rather gently over the fact that he was an authoritarian aristocrat, like most of the others who plotted to kill Hitler - and a committed Catholic so probably a better, if not very good, candidate for sainthood than Pius) and he is surrounded by great British character actors acting their socks off - but characters we know nothing at all about.
It's a decent movie, but you see it for the acting, and the handsome, accurate settings. It's too simplistic and too glossy, but Von Stauffenberg and his group were genuine heroes. If it has something to teach is that complicated plots don't work in real life...