The year of release, the international cast and production, all misguided me when I sat to watch "the Night of the Generals", at night, on a French TV-channel (and it was a French-dubbed copy). I was vaguely waiting for a tedious pudding, full of villains and with some redeeming heroes, in a run-of-the-mill denunciations of Nazi craziness, 25 years later. Mislead.<br /><br />The pace, the cinematography, the plots and their intertwining, some sorts of, er, modesty in the way to tell the story, all almost perfectly works.<br /><br />I won't discuss some minor slips on the historical background. I could let me follow the characters, especially the minor ones (Inspecteur Morand, Fraulein Seydlitz), I finally agreed with O'Toole's performance (more "homme au masque de cire" than ever), enjoy some great lines (some reminiscent of "Monsieur Verdoux"), I found the romance between Hartmann/Courtenay and Syedlitz's daughter tense, subtly told and played...<br /><br />I think the length of the movie is perfectly fit ; the last thirty minutes, in modern Germany, are very necessary and cynical in the right way.<br /><br />Apart from the musical score (much too heavy and useless in the Varsovian part) and the very end - conventional and contradictory with what we are supposed to understand of Morand's quest -, the whole thing is a very good surprise.<br /><br />Do not neglect this film. It's worth 145 minutes of your life.