Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Von Stauffenberg on film before Tom Cruise
An earlier film about Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and the attempts of other German officers has resurfanced and one would think on surface make Valkyrie look better. The Plot to Kill Hitler, is a 1990 TV movie produced by Mark (son of David) Wolper filmed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia.
Brad Davis of Midnight Express and Fassbinder's Querelle played von Stauffenberg. He was an actor with a presence who is maybe now most remembered of being in the closet with AIDS during most of the entire 1980s. There has been speculation that Davis acquired the disease from shooting needles and other reports that he was bisexual. Whatever. I remember what seemed an incredibly honest moment of him singing cutting an apple, I believe with a pocket knife, probably higher than a kite in a documentary on Fassbinder during the filming of Querelle with the translation title of The Wizard of Babylon Was he a better von Stauffenberg than Tom Cruise? Certainly he was not as distracting.
After seeing Valkyrie, The Plot to Kill Hitler is like seeing the same events in some kind of transformed dream reality. It even reminds me a little bit of Wes Andersen's Max Fischer players reenacting Serpico. It isn't a bad movie, but let's face it is a television movie, and that means I was able to do some prep work for school tomorrow while it played.
Plot was directed by Larry Schiller, one of the most notorious of media gadflies who has assembled large format photo books with the likes of Norman Mailer, won Emmys for a number of television movies including ones on Peter the Great and Gary Gilmore and more recently was the ghostwriter for the OJ Simpson book project I Want to Tell You that was pulled in the midst of controversy.
Despite the cinematography of Freddie Francis and performances by Davis and Ian Richardson, it is a kind of flat sledgehammer affair. The extras are posed as if in photojournalism of wartime Berlin and it creates a kind of pretentious environment. But, hey this was a TV movie.
The actions and plotting of this bear much resemblance to Valkyrie but Plot features more of Von Stauffenberg's wife Nina and his family. And there is also more stress on the fact that he was a Count, and this difference in class separated him from many of his Nazi colleagues. Ultimately, I couldn't resist when I saw this oddity in the new releases, but now after it and Valkyrie, I don't ever have to see another film about the Wolf's Lair assassination attempt for the rest of my life.
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:00 PM
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