There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East.
She hasn’t sung a note in a year or too and her regular appearances at veteran reunions have come to an end. In 2015 Dame Vera Lynn wasn’t well enough to attend the 70th anniversary celebration of VE Day. But she is still among us and on 20 March she qualifies for a telegram from Her Majesty. To celebrate, her original label Decca have dusted off some of the old tunes from the war and subjected them to a spot of spit and polish.
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.
Pigeons were described in this riveting programme as man’s best feathered friends, as well as an urban pest: the 35,000 of them that used to flock round Trafalgar Square deposited some 390 tons of unharvested guano – bird poo, in simpler words – annually that had to be cleaned up, until bird feeding was banned. Mess and noise made the same bird, so loved by pigeon fanciers, into dreaded flying rats, a leading public menace.
After doing his time in the Hollywood wilderness, Mel Gibson is back with a bang – a cacophony of bangs, frankly – with Hacksaw Ridge. With six Oscar nominations including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Picture, it's enough to tempt a man to risk a celebratory tequila.
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
The most surprising thing about ITV's latest period drama is that they've scheduled it for Monday nights. Since you could soundbite it as a mash-up of Mr Selfridge and Downton Abbey, you'd have thought The Halcyon was a shoo-in for that peachy Sunday-night slot.
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad).
This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.
We last encountered Stephen Poliakoff on TV in 2013's Dancing on the Edge, which provoked mixed reactions (not least on theartsdesk). That was the story of a black jazz band in 1930s London, who played gigs at swanky hotels. Close to the Enemy (★) is set in London just after the end of World War Two, and happens to feature a jazz band with a black singer who perform in a once-swanky hotel somewhat gone to seed.