VALKYRIE PORTRAYS THE LAST & MOST EXTENSIVE PLOT TO KILL HITLER
There were 20 plots to kill Hitler. One was the failure of a bomb to explode in 1943 on the aircraft carrying Hitler out of Smolensk. The most complex and well planned effort, which failed on July 20, 1944, involved several generals and other high-ranking military officers led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (played by Tom Cruise). When the film begins, Stauffenberg has been consigned to battle in North Africa during 1942 because of his intemperate criticism of Hitler as a war criminal as well as a traitor to Germany for allowing the SS and the Gestapo to trample on human rights throughout Europe. In a battle there, he loses an eye and several fingers, so he returns to Berlin as a war hero albeit with one idea in mind—to kill Hitler. He joins an ongoing conspiracy involving several high-ranking officers to kill Hitler and eventually plays a key role as the one who is able to plant a bomb due to his proximity to the Führer, particularly after his promotion to Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army. Much of the film focuses on the chain of command on which he is to rely in a plot to kill Hitler, mobilize the Reserve Army to take over key ministries in Berlin, and install a new civilian government that can negotiate peace with the American forces. Operation Valkyrie, as originally designed, was a plan for Hitler to restore power in the event of chaos (including a possible coup) prompted by the Allied bombing of Germany, but war hero Stauffenberg sneakily gets Hitler to sign a change in the plans that will facilitate the coup itself. Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer, is thus a docudrama, providing times of day as subtitles during the hours before the planting of the bomb at his headquarters near Rastenberg, East Prussia. As history records, the plot failed. The bomb did not injure Hitler. Unaware that the Führer was still alive, Stauffenberg flies to Berlin, Operation Valkyrie is put into effect, and the coup is ongoing when a crucial link in the chain of command, overlooked by the plotters, is broken. The film is sponsored by the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin, thus in keeping with the effort to prove that many Germans opposed Hitler despite risking death to themselves and their families in so doing. Although a title at the end indicates that Stauffenberg’s wife escaped retribution and lived until 2006, the film fails to point out that afterward more than 5,000 were arrested and 200 executed, thereby rooting out most of the resistance movement. Because the film vividly dramatizes the rarely revealed particulars of the intricate plotting, the Political Film Society has nominated Valkyrie as best film exposé of 2008. MH
TWO FILMS EXPLAIN HOW THE HOLOCAUST CONTINUES TO HAUNT THE PRESENT
Some Day You’ll Understand (Plus tard), a French film directed by Amos Gitai, starts with Victor Bastien (played by Hippolyte Giradot), baptized as a Catholic, who is searching for a buried past. The film traces Victor’s quest from his childhood discovery of unexplained mementoes in an attic. Finally, his mother Rivka Bastien (played by Jeanne Moreau) outs herself as a survivor of Klaus Barbie’s purge of Jews during World War II to her grandchildren. Occasional flashbacks confuse the continuity during the story, which is based on the recent autobiographical novel by Jérôme Clément. Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader, also involves flashbacks, tracing the fictional life of Germany’s greatest clown, Adam Stein (played by Jeff Goldblum), who one night amuses Klein (played by Willem Dafoe). When Klein later becomes a Nazi SS officer, he saves Adam’s life on condition that he will amuse him by playing the role of dog in his office and playing the violin as Stein’s wife, daughter, and others enter a gas chamber. After the war, Adam goes to Israel, where he is committed from time to time to a mental sanatorium of Holocaust survivors, as he occasionally experiences sociopathic violent rage. Based on a 1968 novel by Yoram Kaniuk, Adam is cured of his malady in a most unusual manner. MH