Valkyrie

Christopher McQuarrie wrote the script with Nathan Alexander after seeing the Bendlerblock 20 July memorial in 2002; he wanted to direct, but the money came only with Bryan Singer. Germany first refused the Bendlerblock: a place of remembrance and mourning would lose its dignity as a film set. Permission came later, and before the execution scene was shot in the real courtyard in September 2007, Tom Cruise had the crew hold a moment of silence. Singer dropped the German accents his cast had tried: they would sound silly and pull from the plot’s drive. The film declares it in the first minute: Cruise opens in German, the film moves into English, and the bargain is settled before the story starts. Cruise rehearsed against the real Stauffenberg’s Tunisia injuries: dressing, carrying and writing without a left eye, right hand and two fingers of the left. The colonel’s eldest son, retired general Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, said only terrible kitsch would come of it and Cruise should keep his hands off his father; his grandson Philipp von Schulthess, in the film, disagreed. A good fit if a thriller whose suspense hangs on a signature and runs largely on paperwork will not bore you. Not for anyone wanting consistent accents in a story set in Germany; everyone speaks in their own.