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“What would Lina Wertmüller think?” a friend of mine wondered on reports that Tom Cruise‘s latest project, Valkyrie, about the German generals’ assassination plot against Hitler in 1944, had run into some Teutonic heavy weather. Germany Bans Cruise’s Hitler Film the day-one headlines read—a prohibition stemming, one might expect, from the producer/star’s notorious Church of Scientology connections—though as David Hudson pointed out at GreenCine Daily (June 25), this wasn’t exactly what went down [all links in quote from GreenCine posting]. “The New York Post‘s Lou Lumenick writes, ‘Germany, which takes a dim view of Scientology, has banned a new movie starring the cult’s most famous member from shooting in Deutschland.’ Nope, not true, actually. The Reuters story he points to gets it right …
“Cruise’s intention to take on the role of a resistance hero is irksome and the objections of Stauffenberg’s son, Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (yes, it brings the Monty Python sketch to my mind, too), are understandable. … Even so, the rhetoric of some opposed to the very idea is beginning to take on a slight whiff of hysteria.” All of which had become a dead letter by week’s end, when the German defense ministry called the dogs off and passed the buck (for Bendlerblock shooting permits) to the ministry of finance.
“‘Oh, I thought it was Dianetics! Well, you know there’s help for that!’”
