The Night of the Generals (1967)

THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Anatole Litvak
    Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay,
    Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray, Philippe Noiret,
    Joanna Pettet, Coral Browne, Christopher Plummer,
    Gordon Jackson, Harry Andrews, Sabine Sun
The mystery starts with the murder of a prostitute in Warsaw in 1942. There are two clues to the murder: the ghoulish manner of the woman's death - she was stabbed viciously and repeatedly - and a witness who caught a glimpse of a uniform through a crack in a door - the man leaving the scene of the crime was a German general. An intelligence officer (Omar Sharif) quickly identifies three generals whose whereabouts are unaccounted for on the night of the murder, but before his investigation can get anywhere, he's conveniently promoted and transferred to Paris. Two years later, he's still in Paris, and coincidentally, so are all three generals, when another bar girl turns up murdered in exactly the same way as the first one. Can Colonel Sharif solve the case before the Allies retake the city, or will the hooker-stabbing general get away again? The mystery's not much of a mystery after a while, but the narrative holds your interest, raising questions repeatedly about the relative significance of a single murder when mass murder's the order of the day. In fact, the investigation that begins with Sharif in Warsaw survives its original investigator and goes on long after the war.  Most of the Germans are played by Brits. Maurice Jarre's haunting, martial score is one of his best. O'Toole, playing the youngest and maddest of the generals, gives his most rigidly contained (and least expressive) performance.