"THE NIGHT OF THE GENERALS".........HEIL AND HIGH WATER........

The Night Of The Generals (1967)   Deep, deep inside this lumbering behemoth, assembled by cigar-chompin' mega-producer Sam Spiegel ("Lawrence Of Arabia")  you can find one brutally ironic idea.........struggling mightily to escape into the daylight from the big budget swamp surrounding it....

                How do you rationally quantify a murder in the midst of a world war?   What's one single homicide compared to the daily slaughter of thousands of combatants and innocents?

               So as warfare rages, does murder become an antiquated concept?  The rule of law and what constitutes civilized behavior,  at the end of the day, are strictly in eye of whoever's winning.

                Fascinating concept........worthy of movie that would focus on it with single-minded intensity.

                That's not this movie.......

                Sadly, the sheer brilliance of the central storyline bobs along in the ambitious sprawl of an all-star epic that sweats and strains to become too many genres all at the same time -  war movie, war drama, star-crossed love story and.....oh yes,  murder mystery.

                  A German Major (Omar Sharif), doggedly investigates the murder of Polish prostitute in World War II-ravaged Warsaw. His trio of suspects......all German Generals. (Peter 'O Toole, Donald Pleasance, Charles Gray).

                   The movie quickly tosses out its murder-mystery aspirations once you get a good look at O'Toole, who performs his wrapped-too-tight madman as if waiting to be fitted for straight-jacket.

                   Numerous tedious subplots start to clutter up the proceedings, none of which we're going to waste time detailing here.

                    Clearly, Sharif's relentless pursuit of 'O Toole is what this movie should have been all about.........but at 2 and a half hours, it floats around in all directions, even taking time out for the botched 'Valkyrie' plot to blow up Hitler.

                    By the time it crawls to its conclusion, 20 years later in 1965, you wonder if the whole 'serial-killer-in-the-middle-of-mass-killing' idea ever really engaged the people who made the movie.......(except for 'O Toole, fully committed to playing his Nazi Jack The Ripper to the hilt....)

                  BQ fires off 2 missed-opportunity stars (**) for a typically huge Big Important Movie of the 1960's  that lost sight of its one single Big Important plot.