HOWZAT

All Singer’s films, including the superhero flicks, are born of a tendency to “gravitate towards stories that centre on lonely characters”, he says. (He ladles on his own outsider credentials: gay, a Jew, adopted, an only child.) “The Usual Suspects’ Verbal Kint; the German who’s trying to kill Hitler; even House [Singer produces the hit television series, having cast Hugh Laurie as the maverick doctor]. I projected myself all over that.”

A decision was made early on — probably correctly — to have the cast retain their natural speaking voices. “We thought, everyone walking around with some sort of Atlanticised German accent, it’s gonna be a Mel Brooks comedy,” McQuarrie says. Singer rejects suggestions that Cruise is a vanilla actor, denying Stauffenberg any Schindler-like duality. “Like when he’s playing [the vampire] Lestat?” he retorts. “Or the hit man in Collateral?” And with Cruise on board, “you’re allowed more toys”, he laughs, as well as the budget for scenes to be shot at locations such as Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, Stauffen-berg’s original apartment building and the Bendlerblock itself. No permission was ever denied, Singer asserts. “The German government gave us millions of dollars in subsidies.” Yes, he confirms, there was a lab accident that resulted in one night’s shooting having to be redone, and an incident in which extras fell off a moving lorry, with nobody seriously hurt.

Singer’s bigger regret is having missed the chance to speak to Nina von Stauffenberg, Claus’s widow, who died shortly before production began. “The family is not a corporation, they’re all individuals,” McQuarrie adds. “There are members of the family who embraced what we were doing [a grandson worked on the crew]. There are others who are waiting to see the finished product.”

Whatever the verdict, the film will certainly bring the July 20 plot to a broad audience. It will also reopen debate as to whether the conspirators were altruists, as the film suggests, or opportunists mindful of Germany’s inevitable defeat. Stauffenberg, while undoubtedly brave, had been a loyal servant of the Reich and supported the Sudetenland annexation. “This wasn’t a desperate attempt, ‘Oh, we’re losing the war,’ ” Singer says. “It was, ‘Sixteen thousand people are being murdered a day. This has to stop.” He emphasises that the conflict for the officer class, to whom oaths of allegiance were sacrosanct, was that they had been forced to pledge their loyalty to Hitler rather than their country.

Nonetheless, by war’s end, and with skins to be saved, Hitlercide does seem to have become an underground sport. What is revealing about Valkyrie, one of 15 or so known plots, is just how far the intrigue extended: the Berlin police were in on it; the Abwehr, the German secret service, even supplied the explosives, as they had done for Operation Flash, an earlier attempt by Major-General Tresckow to blow up Hitler’s plane. The July 20 attempt was not even Stauffenberg’s first crack; he was involved in two aborted missions (conflated to one in the film).

If the film underlines one thing, it is that the second world war remains a rich seam to be mined by cinema, following the success, a decade ago, of Saving Private Ryan. After the recent German’s-eye perspectives of Downfall, Before the Fall, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Reader and the impending Good, the pendulum is swinging back towards Old Testament revenge in the shape of Defiance, about Jewish resistance fighters, and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic], which promises to slit Nazi throats and then some.

The irony is that Stauffenberg’s failure may have hastened the war’s conclusion. That year, the British war cabinet declined a plan, Operation Foxley, in which Hitler would have been bumped off by agents of the Special Operations Executive. Aside from political concerns over the creation of a martyr, or allowing Himmler to fill the power vacuum, it was overwhelmingly evident that Hitler was making such a colossal mess militarily that the surest route to victory lay in keeping him in power, and very much alive.

Valkyrie opens on January 23

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