Operation: Daybreak

A war film set in Prague. Reinhard Heydrich is Acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He runs the territory and has crushed the resistance. The Czechoslovak government in exile in London makes a decision. He will be killed. Three soldiers parachute in. Jan Kubiš, Jozef Gabčík and Karel Čurda. A resistance network in Prague hides them. From there the film is a story of preparation. The route, the hour, the weapons, the escape and the waiting. The assassination takes place in 1942. At a bend, where the car slows. The gun jams. The plan breaks down and they go on with a grenade. Heydrich does not die at once. He dies of his wounds days later. The reprisal is terrible. The Germans destroy the village of Lidice entirely; the men are killed, the women and children taken away. What the narrative is interested in is not an assassination but a price: its real question is whether killing one man was worth the deaths of thousands, and it does not answer. The soldiers hide in a church. The crypt of Saints Cyril and Methodius. The final siege is the longest section. Water, gas, ammunition and a cellar that keeps shrinking. The betrayal comes from inside. One of the team talks. It was shot in Prague, in the real places where the events happened. Timothy Bottoms, Martin Shaw, Joss Ackland, Nicola Pagett and Anthony Andrews are in the cast. Lewis Gilbert directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes war films based on real events and cold telling. Who it is not for: anyone looking for heroism; the narrative does not celebrate a victory and its ending is wholly dark.