uly 20, 1944: a suitcase bomb explodes in Hitler's headquarters, the opening act of a desperate German officers' plot to overthrow the Nazi regime. But the Führer miraculously survives the blast, and the attempted coup, code-named Operation Valkyrie, is soon crushed, its ringleaders rounded up and executed. The "Jackboot Mutiny," one of the last films by renown German director G.W. Pabst, recreates these events with meticulous care, throwing us headlong into the inner workings and dashed ambitions of the coup and its leaders. Released in 1955 under the German title "It happened on July 20th," Pabst's film presents, in the heroic figure of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a counter-image to Nazism's monstrous past, calling upon postwar Germans to ensure that he and others did not give their lives in vain.