Anthropoid

Why they didn’t just say “Tommy Shelby and Christian Grey kill Nazis” I’ll never know.

Anthropoid is the true story of two Czechs who were trained by the Special Operations Executive and then parachuted to just outside Prague by the RAF, tasked with assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, number three (behind Hitler and Himmler) in the Third Reich, and also one of the architects of the Holocaust. Herr Schicklgruber apparently called him “the man with the iron heart”.  When Adolf thinks you’re a bit of a bastard, you’ve got problems.  Heydrich’s role in the Final Solution is brilliantly shown in the TV drama Conspiracy, where he is played by Kenneth Branagh, and which shows the Wannsee Conference, where he got together with Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci, a bloke from Downton Abbey and the guy Claire Underwood has an affair with in House of Cards and decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe.  If you haven’t seen Conspiracy, then you really should (it also features an early role for Tom Hiddleston).

Anyway, Anthropoid starts with Murphy and Dornan dropping into the forest, with Murphy being injured, picked up by people apparently sympathetic to their cause, they have to escape quickly when it appears that they are going to be given up to the Nazis.  They escape into Prague to find that their contact has already been taken away and what remains of the resistance has lost contact with the Czech government in exile in London.

Initially the Czechs are resistant to the plan to assassinate Heydrich, because they know the reprisals that will come, whereas Christian Grey and Tommy Shelby have been out of the country for so long they don’t understand what it is like to live under occupation.

Persuading most of the resistance to help them – they need to prove the Czechs are still resisting the leads also have time for love interests, which doesn’t quite square with the rest of the film, but isn’t too grating.

Like that other middle Europe assassination earlier in the 20th Century, when Franz Ferdinand was killed (Alex Kapranos always was a prick; an art school wanker with an expensive haircut) the assassination doesn’t go to plan, with the Sten gun jamming – Sten guns were notoriously unreliable, so a grenade is thrown, which fatally injures Heydrich, with him dying several days later.

Assassinating a high ranking Nazi in occupied Europe didn’t tend to end well, and one of the plotters decides to betray his colleagues; there’s torture, and several scenes of people taking cyanide pills. I thought one particularly gruesome scene of a 15 year old being shown his mother’s head unless he gave up the whereabouts of the assassins was a bit too much, but then it turns out that it actually happened. The Nazis were right bastards, it seems.  Two villagers were razed to the ground – the destruction of the village of Lidice is recreated, transported to South Wales, in Humphrey Jennings’s superb film The Silent Village (another film well worth watching).

The denouement comes in a violent showdown at a church, in what I assumed was a fiction, but no, it actually happened and this finale contains the only jarring bit of the film – a vision before one of the assassins kills himself rather than be captured.

Sean Ellis – who I have to admit I didn’t know before this film, not only wrote and directed it well, but also worked as cinematographer and camera operator, and does everything ably.  Cillian Murphy’s Czech accent occasionally slips into Tommy Shelby’s Brummie, but the cast are good, and it’s nice to see a British/Czech film about the Second World War that isn’t fictionalised and doesn’t rely on an American to save the day.  A solid film.