All the accolades heaped onto this documentary in the near 50 years since it was made are wholly deserved. Over 251 minutes, Marcel Ophuls weaves together an extraordinary collection of interviews and archive to tell the story of France during the German occupation from 1940-1944.
“I’ve got a terrible confession to make”, I said to my long-suffering partner who had been away for the weekend with our young daughter. “Oh yes,” I could see her thinking, “what have you done now?” “Well, I’ve written a play about the Nazi persecution of the disabled,” was my shifty reply. The truth is it’s such a disgusting subject, I was almost ashamed of what I’d done.
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…
Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having been perceived as too lenient. Described by Hitler as “the man with the iron heart”, he was also the principal planner of the Final Solution.
Anthropoid begins, literally, with a bump, as two agents parachuted in by the Czech government-in-exile based in London crash into a wintry forest outside Prague. They’re played by Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan, and within minutes they’ve been found by a pair of informers, whose truck they steal and head to Prague. There they gingerly negotiate a locked down city before making contact with Toby Jones’ resistance leader and reveal their plans. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the pair have to stay inconspicuous while convincing others of the need to kill Heydrich, always aware that the consequences of doing so might be even more horrific. Which turns out to be the case: the assassination attempt, thrillingly staged, doesn’t quite go to plan, and the fugitives find themselves holed up in a cathedral crypt thanks to a sympathetic priest.
They’re soon aware that innocent civilians are already being shot in reprisals, and that an entire village has been razed based on misinformation. Naturally there’s a wretched Judas figure (a slippery Jiří Šimek) on hand to betray his associates. But faced with the chance to gain a hefty cash reward and save his family, his actions are wholly credible. The interrogation scenes are mercifully brief before the virtuosic final shoot out, in which the rebels ultimately drowned when the crypt is flooded with fire hoses. So far, so bad, and knowing that such events really happened is deeply affecting, as is the fact that a brave band of Czechs and Slovaks put their lives on the line for a country which no longer exists.
To say that this film is technically impressive isn’t to damn it with faint praise; Ellis’s sure-footed direction and spare screenplay take us through this series of unfortunate events at a breakneck pace. Convincing sets and location footage really do conjure up a grey, wartime Prague, and how refreshing to encounter such a spare, economical soundtrack. That the actors all speak accented English is a distraction at first, but the performances are strong enough to overcome any doubts. Especially good support comes from a luminous Anna Geislerová (pictured above right) as Murphy’s love interest. Ellis is notably absent from the disc's bonus features – there’s no director’s commentary, but a "Making Of" short suggests that cast and crew enjoyed working with him.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Anthropoid
In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As modern kids, they turned their noses up at “pigs’ kidneys in mustard sauce”, “breaded brains with cauliflower” or “chicken gizzards in lightly spiced broth”. Now, our bland tubes of homogenised innards disguise their beastly origins: “Whatever used to grunt, moo, cackle, neigh, is turned into sausage.”
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.
It is an axiom of Israel Galván criticism to say the Spaniard is wired differently. He's the "Bowie of flamenco" - leggy and intense, unpredictably sparky, intemittently brilliant, and sometimes incomprehensible. His new show, Lo Real/Le Réel/The Real which had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival last night is about gypsies under Nazism and in the Holocaust, but it approaches its subject in an impressionistic, roundabout way that during the performance feels a lot more like a journey into Israel Galván's oddball consciousness than a history lesson.
Haste was of the essence as the Allies hurried to create the ultimate weapon. They were fearful that Hitler’s Germany, which had been first to split the atom, would beat them to it – and they knew that the Nazis would have no compunction about using it.
The plot to assassinate Hitler that everyone knows about was on 20 July 1944. It had its Hollywood moment in 2008 with Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Von Stauffenberg. That film unfortunately arrived on the coattails of Downfall, which has since made all Anglophone portrayals of the Third Reich look dismally bogus. So it’s of note that Downfall’s director Oliver Hirschbiegel, having taken leave of his senses to make Diana, has turned his attention to the lesser-known attempt on the Führer’s life.
The 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, documenting the Allies' mission to stop the Nazis from going nuclear, is to historical accuracy what David Starkey is to tact. Or common decency. The Saboteurs however, a Norwegian/Danish/British TV co-production, seems to be keener to explore the truth behind the mission. Or at least as much of it as is known.