Disappointing

This looked like a decent film. I did not know it was based on a play, otherwise I would have skipped it. Alas,

-A very Junior NCO, who is not even a Sergeant/Feldwebel (Mayer) addresses a four-star General (Choltitz) without leave and as if they were regular drinking buddies

-A mere Captain/Hauptmann--in his fifties at least--does the same thing to a four-star General (Choltitz), speaking to him as if they were equals, and telling him that he, the Captain/Hauptmann no longer needs to be in Paris and that he, the Captain/Hauptmann, is leaving, without having first been dismissed by the four-star General (Choltitz). This type of informality and familiarity may have been acceptable in Das Reich, Totenkopf or Wiking or any of the other Waffen-SS formations, where equality between officers and enlisted, except during the heat of battle with enemy ordnance coming in, may have been acceptable, but it was most assuredly not acceptable in the very conservative Heer. Certainly, a four-star General whose last name began with "von", such as von Choltitz, would have had any such rank insubordination court-martialed on the spot, and then have the offending soldier/officer immediately sent to a penal battalion on the Ostfront

-A four-star General like Choltitz only has a mere 2nd/ Lieutenant/Leutnant as his orderly officer/head REMF, instead of a thoroughly combat incompetent but politically extremely well connected Colonel/Oberst

-A 1st Lieutenant/Oberleutnant of the Panzerwaffe, and not an officer of the Baupioniere or Sturmpioniere is in charge of rigging and detonating the explosives in the city

-Said 1st Lieutenant/Oberleutnant of the Panzerwaffe who miraculously finds himself doing a Bau/Sturmpioniere's job, has to order his men to "load" (lock and load) their MP-40's before they take care of saboteurs, as if his men did not already have their MP-40's in Condition One because they were, you know, guarding these very same saboteurs.

-Said 1st Lieutenant/Oberleutnant refers to a 2nd Lieutenant/Leutnant as "Unterleutnant," an obvious sop to English-speaking viewers, since there was never such a rank in the Heer, only in the DDR's NVA, which was formed well after the events of this film

-German characters in 1944 use the term "Nazi," an American term that did not enter German usage until after the war. Germans referred to the Third Reich as "die Regierung" and to "Nazis" as either "National-Sozialisten" or "Parteigenosse" during the life of the Third Reich

-A 2nd Lieutenant/Leutnant who is an extremely obvious REMF, leads a charge consisting of himself, a French civilian engineer and an enlisted man armed with an MP-40--while that REMF 2nd Lieutenant/Leutnant is armed only with a small-calibre, limited range, extremely limited magazine capacity Walther PPK. Said extremely obvious REMF 2nd Lieutenant/Leutnant manages to singlehandedly fight off several French resistance members armed with rifles and submachine guns simply by firing ten rounds at them from his Walther PPK without once changing the magazine

-Someone who is very obviously either Turkish or Armenian plays a 2nd Lieutenant/Untersturmführer of the Sicherheitsdienst sent by Himmler to von Choltitz to grab up the Bayeux Tapestry

-Von Choltitz claims that Sippenhaft is an "order" and that he drew it up himself. In reality, "Sippenhaft" just means "kinship/family custody." It was invented by Himmler, not the Heer.

-We are supposed to believed that skull/hawk-faced Andre Dussolier is supposed to be Raoul Nordling, a chubby man with chubby, fat-man cheeks. This has to be one of the worst casting decision since they picked Frankenstein's monster lookalike Ulrich Matthes to play Goebbels and hawk-faced Thomas Kretschmann to play the cherubic-faced Fegelin (when Justus von Dohnanyi far more closely resembled Fegelein) in Der Untergang and since they picked Kenneth Branagh, who has a full head of hair, to play the very balding Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow in Valkyrie.

These days, it seems like almost every film they turn out on the Third Reich is actually in competition with Hogan's Heroes, Last Orgy of the Gestapo, Love Camp 7 and Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The SS for the Oscar Category of "worst Nazisploitation film of the year.

About the only films that got the Third Reich halfway right are Cross of Iron, Stalingrad (the 1990's original, not the horrific Zach Snyder-esque cartoon version by Fedor Bondarchuk) and Das Boot. Der Untergang is decent save for obvious flaws, like who they picked to play Goebbels and the fictional chivalrous portrayal of Mohnke telling the girls to make a break for it since the Reds are not looking for them (when the real Mohnke gave Traudl Junge a report for President Dönitz and told her to break out and give the President that message.) Valkyrie is also semi-OK, except for Branagh's casting and its portrayal of Wolf Graf von Helldorff as showing up on the 20th of July when, in reality, he and Nebe were conspicuous by their absence.

Almost every other film about the Third Reich induces the gag reflex since it includes very extremely obvious anachronisms, like SS/Gestapo men wearing black uniforms after 1938, even if they are not Panzer Crews, Hitler wearing his brown party uniform after 1938, and every soldier wearing the EK 1 with every officer wearing a Ritterkruez.

Benoit killed 2x as many w/o a gun than Belcher did with one/S&W fighting climate change since 1852