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The gallantry, in fact, is the false note. Zuckmayer and Käutner have mocked up a marvelous illusion of life in the Nazi ruling circles at the turning point of the war. The scene, as they paint it, is a seething roach nest of military puritans, rat-eyed party fanatics and servile chimney barons, of endless work, nonstop parties, public arrogance, private Angst, Germanic sentiment and rotting will, of spies, lies and a dirty, interminable fight for personal power. And through the scene but somehow above it, like let's-pretend Valkyries, wanders a tribe of strangely ambivalent German women: violent when they are wicked, passive when they are good.
The character of Harras (played with full vibrato by Actor Jürgens, a sort of John Wayne with Heidelberg trimmings) is a highly romantic one—rather like a combination of Siegfried and Graf Bobby*—and his fiery death is stirringly Wagnerian. But from U.S. moviegoers the hero will probably get no better than pity, and the picture itself, apart from the high praise it deserves as a piece of cinematic craftsmanship, will inevitably inspire a more negative emotion. As the hero himself expresses it: "I can't eat as much as I want to vomit."
*The Austrian figure of fun, a degenerate young aristocrat who always says stupid things that are somehow not so stupid after all. Example: when the tide began to turn against the Nazis, Graf Bobby went into a map store one day and asked for a globe of Germany.