It was based on a best-selling mystery novel that did Tom Clancy-style business, at a time when post-war Euro mystery writers (like Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - remember them?) were bringing the war back in revisionist ways. The Nazi-art theft theme was also a revisionist topic of the day.<br /><br />The two stars who carry the picture hated producer Sam Speigel for past injustices, and hated the picture he had roped them into. O'Toole, in particular, thought it was a comedown to be directed by aging old-schooler Anatole Litvak, though Litvak does keep the Euro flavor consistent in this. O'Toole and Speigel biographies talk of the actor deliberately overplaying the Tanz role so as to sabotage the mystery element of the picture, though it's hard to see how restraint would have improved the role. (And while this pic isn't The Lion in Winter, it's also hard to see how it's worse than Beckett.) <br /><br />Even as a kid, I admired the 'big concept' of the film: Murder is wholesale in Nazi Europe, yet one freak is buying it retail, and another has only as much morality (or perversity) as is necessary to obsessively hunt the small murderer, but not the larger ones. If the state-vs.-individual angle had been played up a little more, if a younger director had made it in an artier style, if it didn't disregard history in so many ways - people would be falling over themselves comparing this to Blow-up as a portrait of modern times. They'd also be talking stuff about low material redeemed.<br /><br />Being closer in time to the war than pictures like The Good German (Ehhh!) gives the apparent offhandedness of the moral treatment of the material a contemporary edge, though. The war slips away into the past without notice, just as, to American eyes, it seemed to have happened in Europe. Only the singular prostitute murders survive as prosecutable crimes - not even as war crimes. O'Toole's Jack-the-Ripperish performance seems to tie the two eras together, and the ending, in which celebration of his public excesses is spoiled by discovery of his private ones, nails the theme in the same deadpan style the picture has quietly established all along. It's hard to fault Litvak in this, though another director might have emphasized the passage of time as a dramatic-psychological element.<br /><br />Like the script of Gangs of New York, Night of the Generals crams in a lot of historical background (yes, with anachronisms like the Warsaw Ghetto action placed in 1942), but it never seems like butt-covering for an inaccurate foreground fiction as in Gangs. Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' trope is put to work, as all facts - even those of the Holocaust - become statistical fodder for the war machine that remade Europe, while only the personal murders that the Tanz character is hunted for disturb the placid hum of the post-war apparatus. So both Litvak and novelist Hans Helmut Kirst are creditable for a contemporary and distanced view of the war. Some transitions and plot points are not suavely or accurately handled, or humanely considered. But don't let bad screenwriter shorthand fool you into thinking this is a comic-book treatment of the war or the post-war era.<br /><br />Compare the themes of individual and state action in Night of the Generals to those in Blade Runner, The Sixth Sense - even The Fugitive. Those pics have a Noir-ish 'victim mentality' akin to Camus' The Stranger, while Generals has an activist mentality like The Plague, presented in a similar deadpan-existentialist style, in the face of futility. However it came about collaboratively, it did come about.