#257: Four films about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich

At least we get to watch Heydrich get shot four times

This review was originally posted to Twitter on May 25, 2020.

Hangmen Also Die!
Initial release: March 27, 1943
Director: Fritz Lang

Operation Daybreak
Initial release: November 1975

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Anthropoid
Initial release: July 1, 2016
Director: Sean Ellis

The Man with the Iron Heart
Initial release: June 7, 2017
Director: Cédric Jimenez

Reinhard Heydrich was a committed Nazi, one of the highest ranking members in the whole party, second only to Hitler and Himmler; he was responsible for the rise of the SS intelligence service from a small room of political officers into a brutally thorough counter-intelligence outfit that stamped out communism and crushed their bitter rivals, the SA, in the 1930s. And he was the architect of the Holocaust. By all rights, he should be considered the worst person in Nazi Germany.

By 1941 Heydrich had risen in the ranks to become one of the leading members of the Nazi Party, and was given the role of protectorate over Czechoslovakia, ruling the country with an iron fist. Thousands died under his reign of terror. But his distance from Berlin, his reputation for unparalleled cruelty, and an active resistance apparatus, made him an ideal target for assassination. On May 27th, 1942, commandos from the Czech army-in-exile, trained by British special forces, attacked Heydrich’s car as he made his daily commute to work. Though they didn’t succeed in killing him right then, he would linger for a week before succumbing to his wounds.

The reprisals in response to the attack, which was codenamed Operation Anthropoid, were swift and brutal. Hundreds were rounded up and executed; two villages, Lidice and Ležáky, were razed to the ground, their inhabitants slaughtered. The assassins were hunted down and killed.

These are the facts. Now here’s four movies about the whole thing.

Let’s start with the oldest one: Hangmen Also Die! It’s probably the most different from the others; it’s largely a work of pure fiction. Many of the details were still classified in 1943 so legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht simply crafted a story with what little info he had. In this case, there’s no mention of parachutists. There’s only a lone assassin, Svoboda, a doctor in public life but in private a member of the Czech resistance. (Amusingly svoboda is the name of one of the real-life parachutists, swapped out at the last minute due to an injury.) Hollywood took a long time to adopt an anti-Nazi stance, largely for financial reasons (gee, that sounds familiar…) By the war’s beginning, however, the mood had changed. And yet, Hangmen Also Die! is probably the most explicitly anti-Nazi film from 1940s Hollywood. Heydrich’s depiction, which is brief, borders on caricature: he’s a campy degenerate who wears lipstick and screams a lot (interestingly enough, his actor, silent film veteran Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, was himself gay.)

Other Nazis don’t fare much better; the gestapo chief seems to be dealing with syphilis and wears bandages and sports boils the whole movie; Gruber, the Gestapo inspector who works to track down the assassin, is a fat, womanizing drunk.

This is very much a Fritz Lang film — the action moves swiftly, every scene has important details no matter how short; there’s twists and turns, every minute a reversal, every scene a betrayal; the script is a slowly widening gyre that threatens to drown all involved. Imagine if Lang’s famous 1930 thriller M was about Heydrich’s assassins and you’ve got about half of this film’s schtick — but only half. The resistance and the Gestapo get equal coverage here, and their individual machinations make for a wild ride. Even the romance subplot is made interesting by being entirely a matter of circumstance — and, in the end, fake anyway. Cinematography by James Wong Howe makes this movie visually miles more interesting than most of its contemporaries — but that’s Lang for you.

In 1975, Warner Brothers produced a more historically accurate take on the assassination. Starring Timothy Bottoms (who played the lead in Johnny Got His Gun) as one of the assassins, this is a straightforward tale about Operation Anthropoid, here called Operation Daybreak. Despite the name change (and anyway it was called The Price of Freedom in the US), this is, generally speaking, a pretty close dramatization of the actual events. We begin with creepy synth music as Heydrich is dressed for the day, before moving on to our Czech heroes. Their names: Jan Kubis, Jozef Gabcik, and Karel Curda. They’ve just been assigned a top secret mission: kill Heydrich at any cost. They are soon parachuted into Czechoslovakia, with orders to connect with the resistance, and make their way into Prague.

The first half of the film switches off between Heydrich (whose even-tempered portrayal is performed by Anton Diffring — another gay man) and the assassins. One notable scene involves Heydrich jokingly putting on a crown rumored to kill the unrighteous who wear it within a year. While the film strives for realism, we get an early scene that, as far as I know, is a fabrication: an early assassination attempt, shooting at Heydrich from a railyard building as he leaves for Berlin on a train, foiled by another train passing in front.

In the end, they find out that he’s been promoted and that he’s to leave in a few days, possibly permanently, so they quickly hash together a plan to assassinate him in the open, at a particular curve in the road on his daily commute. We know what happens next: the provided sten gun fails, forcing the assassins to instead throw incendiary weapons, in this case a standard “pineapple” grenade (which is inaccurate but whatever.) They’re then hunted down and betrayed by Curda, culminating in a shootout in a cathedral.

This is a solid film with decent acting that is gorgeously shot on location; the use of synth music really adds a bit of a horror movie vibe, especially as Heydrich himself has a particular leitmotif that’s right out of Halloween. It works great.

Next up is Anthropoid, probably the best of the three latter movies. Heydrich is almost completely absent from this film — he’s an objective, nothing more. The story is about his assassins, with Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan in the lead. It opens like Operation Daybreak does, with our heroes (this time just Gabcik and Kubis) parachuting in. After a brief encounter with some would-be quislings in the wilderness, they steal a truck and make their way to Prague. They soon connect with the resistance and their comrades and begin to put together a plan; however, there is some resistance. Everyone knows the consequences for killing Heydrich: the Nazis would rain a world of shit upon the entire populace. In spite of this, they push on. The story balances the movie perfectly: the first half is the preparation, which is portrayed in a series of montages and meetings as they put together a picture of Heydrich’s life. The second half is the aftermath and reprisals, with the pivotal scene right in the middle. The tension building up is racheted up to a fever pitch; the assassination is, of course, messy, which only gives a sort of high-tension blue balls all the way to the finale, a nearly half-hour long firefight in a church that does not end with a miraculous escape. This firefight, by the way, is the best of the three movies that portray it. It’s tense, it’s brutal, it’s a non-stop ride that’s a heart attack a minute. I would even go so far as to say it’s one of the best protracted firefight scenes in a movie ever made.

While the story does spend a lot of time on the relationships between Gabcik and Kubis and the two women they pretend to date as cover, this is ultimately a tense spy film about one of the most important acts in the war. Murphy and Dornan are both great in this film; they’re two very different people with two very different relationships with their partners, and the dynamic makes for interesting storytelling amidst the horrors of the Nazi jackboot. Much to my amusement the film actually for once calls Murphy out for his deceptive youthfulness; he’s nowhere near the adorable 20-something twink he was when 28 Days Later made him famous, and while he’s a far better actor now, sometimes he feels miscast, like in Dunkirk. Not so here.

We’re treated to usually solid cinematography. Ellis has an eye for breathtaking wide shots that show Prague at its best (minus the Nazis strutting about.) Only an overuse of shakycam mars what’s otherwise a visually arresting film.

And then, finally, there’s The Man with the Iron Heart. Here, we step away from focus on the assassins; instead, the first half of the film is a biopic about Heydrich himself, played by none other than Jason Clarke (another decent actor who gets miscast a lot.) Clarke’s portrayal of Heydrich is probably the most nuanced of the bunch; ambitious and focused, Heydrich is a family man who nevertheless places the party over his wife. He’s a far cry from Lang’s prancing comic book villain, yet still a deeply flawed, evil human being the world would be better off without.

We begin with Heydrich around 1930 as he receives a dishonorable discharge from the German navy following allegations that he’s cheating on his fiance; the thing is, he was — with the woman who would then introduce him to Heinrich Himmler, reviving his sputtering career. We then move into the war itself; his Einsatzgruppen is regarded with suspicion at best by the Wehrmacht, but his mastery of information-gathering allows him to blackmail people into doing what he demands. (He is, of course, not immune to being called out on his own sordid past.) At the halfway mark the focus switches to the assassins; the rest of the film is a somewhat accelerated version of the events seen in Operation Daybreak or Anthropoid. This leaves the film feeling somewhat split in two; Heydrich almost disappears from his own movie.

Jiminez is a fine director who puts music to good use (Heydrich’s background as a violinist serves as an excuse for lots of strings in the score.) Both halves of the film look great, with decent cinematography and acting (Clarke makes good villains.) But the pacing is off. The first half of the film is better put together, a decently-paced biopic that depicts the meteoric rise of the man who would become the Butcher of Prague; the second half of the film has a lot of the same intensity as Anthropoid but lacking the pacing and characterization.

I can’t help but feel like the film would have been better off split into two movies, but then again, the second half was done better in Anthropoid and Operation Daybreak, and as for the first half, who wants to watch a movie all about a Nazi?

You might ask why I decided to watch four different movies about the same event. I would argue that the assassination of Heydrich, aside from being a matter of Czech national pride, was also, in part, a marker of the turning point of the war. (I am not Czech by the way.) It proved that not even the highest echelons of the Nazi hierarchy were untouchable. It was the excuse the Allies needed to start making up for the betrayal of the Munich agreement, when Czechoslovakia was simply handed to the Nazis in early 1939 to prevent a war that came anyway. And, perhaps most important, these films depict an incredibly crucial event that is often forgotten by western filmmakers. It’s not D-Day, or Pearl Harbor, or whathaveyou — but just because it’s not important to western mythmaking doesn’t mean it’s not important.

And, finally, it’s an excuse to watch some damn good films about killing Nazis.