~ by martin kessler ~

Atentát is a film that’s often on my mind. It’s about a history, but a history that my understanding of is inextricably tangled with its representation on film. Otherwise distant, the truths and emotions of that history are transmitted through the cinematic medium to weigh on me.

The 1964 Czechoslovak film tells the story of the assassination (the word "atentát" means assassination in English) of Reinhard Heydrich and its aftermath. I’d like to talk about Atentát, but to discuss the killing of Heydrich, it’s important to say a little of who Heydrich was.

Hitler was Hitler, but Heydrich was the archetypal Nazi, in both appearance and character. Even though he was subordinate to Himmler in the SS, it’s Heydrich who Hitler supposedly wanted to one day succeed him as chancellor. Heydrich, the blond, Iron Cross-wearing true believer. Heydrich, the lead architect of the Holocaust. Who Hitler himself called, “the man with the iron heart.”

In the opening scene of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, Heydrich’s name is invoked. The quadrilingual Austrian SS colonel character portrayed by Christoph Waltz remarks in English, “Heydrich apparently hates the moniker the good people of Prague have bestowed on him. Actually, why he would hate the name ‘The Hangman’ is baffling to me. It would appear he has done everything in his power to earn it.”

Inglorious Basterds goes on to present a crass fantasy of men on a mission to kill Nazis, turning the second world war into a Spaghetti Western playground. A fantasy that climaxes in the massacre of a movie theatre filled with the German high command (including Hitler himself). However, there is one Nazi who is notably absent from that scene; ‘The Hangman’ who was foreshadowed in that opening. The rationale of course would be that even in Tarantino’s version of World War II, Heydrich was already dead. The Basterds’ job had been done for them by a fistful of Czechoslovaks. After seeing Atentát, Inglorious Basterds shouldn’t just seem crass, but entirely deficient*.

A film that approaches Heydrich as a character, is the made-for-television recreation of the Wannsee Conference, Conspiracy. A sort of anti-12 Angry Men (or 12 Angry Ger-Men if you prefer). Fifteen senior officials of the German government, sitting around a table, over brandy and cigars, and a veneer of politeness, committing a crime of incomprehensible magnitude.

Heydrich (played like Authority-incarnate by Kenneth Branagh) is their ring leader. He enters the film, piloting his private airplane, descending from the heavens much like Hitler in the opening sequence of the damned documentary, Triumph of The Will**. His goal is to ensure that all men there and the government departments they represent, would be on the same page for the ‘Final Solution’. They debate the methods and legalities (“all our actions must be predicated on law”) of eliminating the Jewish people from existence, but Heydrich comes across as the most certain about it. When the topic of mass sterilization is raised, Heydrich shuts it down by saying, “That’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump. Dead women don’t get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization. Put it that way.” He’s the sort of man who could make you believe in evil. I can imagine Heydrich saying some variation of that line Suetonius attributed to Caligula, the mad Caesar who would be assassinated after his short cruel reign, “If only all of Rome had one neck to cut”.

At one point in Conspiracy, an official remarks that, “This is more than war. There must be a different word for this.” The shadow of the Holocaust looms so large over the story that Atentát tells, that simply describing it as a war film feels inadequate. Even though Conspiracy is set before the gas chambers had been built, at that point in time Heydrich had already overseen mass murder as supervisor of the Einsatzgruppen, the German death squads. Genocide was already in motion.

As the ending titles of Conspiracy would illustrate, many of those officials would survive the war and escape any real reprisal or serious punishment. It’s unsettling to see ‘Worked as a business clerk. Died in 1982’ and ‘Became a tax advisor. Died in 1987’ be the epilogues to men who had committed crimes against humanity itself.

But Heydrich would die. Just a few weeks after that conference in Conspiracy, Heydrich would be killed.

And that brings us to Atentát.

The director of Atentát was Jiří Sequens. A theatre director who made the jump to film after studying at the Moscow Film School during the Stalinist Era. He’d direct twenty-three films in fifty years, though Atentát is generally regarded as the most noteworthy and greatest artistic achievement of a career that could other-wise be described as one of a journeyman. He’d spend his later years teaching at the Czech film school FAMU, and die in 2008. A part of me wants to credit History as the main auteur of the film, and as Sequens would say, “The plot of the film is entirely written by history alone.” Sequens comes across as someone with more skill than imagination, but capable of recognizing the artistic nature of the story the film tells, and smart enough to leave as little of his stamp on it as possible. I think that’s a major reason why the film works so well.

In Atentát, Heydrich is played by German actor Siegfried Loyda. Loyda was trained at the Leipzig Conservatory and was primarily a voice actor. He’d become a staple of East German radio dramas, though it was his appearance that would get him his first film role in Atenát. A near dead-ringer for Heydrich, it’s often Loyda’s face that comes to my mind first when I read about that dread historical figure. Sequens would say that he had a great problem with the casting of Loyda, because he was “an incredibly nice man” and it took careful direction to make him convincing as a monster. Loyda said he’d “much rather play Mister Hulot”, but in his few scenes he gives a great impression of Heydrich’s harsh arrogant nature.

Heydrich had the plumb position of acting-Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (technically the nation of Czechoslovakia didn’t exist during WWII), and used it to indulge in a delusion of regality. Heydrich’s love of Wagnerian myth and grandeur extended even beyond that of the average cultured Nazi, having grown up in the household of a composer father who idolized Wagner. Heydrich would put himself up in a chateau, north of Prague, and condescendingly refer to the people he oppressed as “my Czechs”, like he was a monarch.

In Atentát, Jewish forced labourers are shown sweeping the dirt road leading up to that chateau.

At the chateau Heydrich would be seen practicing fencing (a sport he really had become a champion at), like some nobleman from the previous century. Only with SS insignia sewn onto his fencing uniform.

Another scene depicts Heydrich committing an act of supreme hubris by trying on Václav’s crown. Dedicated to King and Saint Václav, who was murdered on the steps of the church while begging for sanctuary. Supposedly, this crown-incident actually happened. I’ve read that Heydrich putting the crown on his head could have just as easily been apocryphal. I’ve also read that Richard III’s deformed back was apocryphal, but then archeologists dug his skeleton out from under a parking lot and there was his spine, twisted as Shakespeare would have us believe. The poetry of history isn’t to be underestimated. As the assassination of Heydrich would go on to prove, History is an author with a sense of drama, irony and symbolism more acute than most writers'.

Of course, even though Heydrich’s role in the film is pivotal, it’s relatively small. Much more time is spent with the men who were given the quixotic task of killing him.

The lead assassins were friends; Jan Kubiš (a Czech), and Jozef Gabčík (a Slovak, though he speaks unaccented Czech). In Atentát they’re played by Rudolf Jelínek (who had previously appeared in Karel Zeman’s half-animated The Fabulous Baron Munchausen) and Ladislav Mrkvička (who previously had roles in the Holocaust film Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness, and the influential sci-fi film Ikarie XB-1) respectively. Gabčík comes across as the more solemn, while Kubiš the more light-hearted. It’s easy to imagine a Jean-Pierre Melville remake starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as Kubiš and Alain Delon as Gabčík.

I wonder how much of those characterizations are true to life, and how much they’re projections of Czech and Slovak generalizations onto the men. Again, there was no Czechoslovakia during the war. The nation was in a state of limbo. Its government in exile, Slovaks had independence as German collaborators and Bohemia & Moravia were under Heydrich’s ‘protection’. However the assassination can be said to be a Czechoslovak effort. There’s perhaps a symbolic significance to having a Czech and a Slovak working together to try and save the very idea of a Czechoslovak nation.

In a photograph of the real men taken in England, you can see them smiling together.

They’d recruit other Czech resistance fighters into their mission. I don’t want to bombard you with too many names, but it might be worth saying that the film’s cast would be rounded out with Radoslav Brzobohatý (who would star in The Ear and All My Good Countrymen) as the older-brother-ly Adolf Opálka, Jiří Kodet (who’d act in over a hundred Czech films, and end his career with the holocaust film Divided We Fall, and playing film director František Vláčil in Sentiment) as Josef Valčík. Brzobohatý and Kodet would form a close friendship during the six month shoot, a friendship that would last “until Kodet’s last breath.” There’s also a theatre actor, Josef Vinklář who would have the dubious honour (I’ll explain why ‘dubious’ before the end) of playing Karel Čurda.

The men meet in England, where what was left of the Czechoslovak government resided in exile. The beginning of the film focuses on the men’s training, in a lighthearted sequence. They’d joke and complain and goof off. Why is it so hard to take zip-lining seriously? The bit of dialogue from that sequence that stands out is, “You’re not a real soldier, you think too much.”

Soon Kubiš and Gabčík are given their assignment to parachute back into their former homeland to kill Heydrich. It would be called ‘Operation Anthropoid’ because the justification for killing Heydrich would be that he wasn’t human, he only resembled one; an anthropoid. There’s the inescapable irony of a man who had used ‘not quite human’ to kill so many people, he himself being dehumanized to be killed. Or maybe it’s not irony, just a truism of making killing a little easier.

The Czechoslovak parachutists are not called by their real names during the film. The names they are given come across more like placeholders or even code names. Whenever Jiří Sequens or actors discuss the film, they refer to the men by their true names. I hope you won’t mind me using the historical names here to avoid unnecessary confusion (so many háčeks here already!).

I wonder if part of the reason why their real names were not used in the film was because the story was diminished in communist era Czecholsovakia, when Atentát was made. Certain details of the mission were suppressed, in part for the parachutists having come from ‘the wrong side’, flying in from England, with ‘the right side’ of course being the Soviet Union during the 1960s. My father would tell me that when he first saw the film during its original release, he thought part of what made the assassins appealing was that weren’t communists. Jiří Sequens originally tried to film Atentát four years earlier in 1960, but deliberately halted development when he was asked to make a fictional connection between the story and the communist revolt for propaganda purposes.

A person living outside of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s might have had an easier time acquainting themselves with the details of the story. Believe it or not, there are more English language films about the assassination, than Czech-language films...

There’s Operation Daybreak, which is unexceptional outside of a misplaced ‘doomed gay romance’ subtext.

There’s The Man with the Iron Heart, the unfortunate film version of Laurent Binnet’s novel HHhH (a superb deconstruction of ‘the historical novel’, or “infranovel”, as well as a superb telling of these events and their context), which manages to lose everything that made the book interesting in its adaptation by French director Cédric Jimenez. Jimenez misses the point in that way that only a French intellectual could miss the the point.

Even during the war, when the specifics of the assassination were not widely known, there were two imaginative American film productions about it; Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht!), and Douglas Sirk’s Hitler's Madman. Perhaps those directors were motivated to make those film to distance themselves as far as they could from Germany in the eyes of Hollywood. Though Lang’s mother was Czech. I would guess maybe he actually cared about the story. I’ve read that Sirk had Czech roots as well, but haven’t been able to figure out exactly to what degree that might be true. It’s even rumoured that a proposed sequel to Casablanca would have tied into Heydrich’s assassination. It would have made sense, the Victor Laszlo character was a Czech resistance fighter after all.

The recent Czech-British co-production, Anthropoid (more or less a remake of Atentát) might hold the claim to being the most accurate recounting of this story on film. It features Jamie Dornan as Kubiš and Cillian Murphy Gabčík. One critic disparaged that it’s the sort of film where you just know Toby Jones will show up without without being told he’s in the film, but I think that’s one of its virtues. It’s the sort of film that will have you rooting for Toby Jones to heroically bite down on a cyanide capsule as well. I do appreciate Anthropoid for drawing attention to certain details glossed over in Atentát, which I’ll mention further along.

Still, even with all that competition, I think it’s safe to say that Atentát remains the most artfully faithful film version of the assassination. Or at the very least, the most Czech.

Things get properly started in Atentát with the scene of the parachutists diving from a Canadian airplane into Nazi-occupied Bohemia. The scene was filmed with real parachutists at night, and was apparently considered quite dangerous. There’s a frighting abstract quality to the terrain they fall towards.

It reminds me a little of the digital display of New York (achieved with reflective tape on miniatures) that Snake glides into in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. And like that dystopian version of New York, the parachutists enter a dystopian version of Bohemia.

Once they hit the ground, the feeling of danger is palpable, no matter how mundane the situation. Critics like Peter Debug would bemoan the ‘sci-fi’ sounding title of Anthropoid, but there’s something unmistakably Twilight Zone-like in seeing a familiar skyline rendered uncanny with swastikas flying over it. And for the parachutists, it might have also been strange to see people driving on the right side of the road rather than the left (one change the Nazis made that stuck).

Much of the first half of Atentát is spent finding a reliable safe house, getting in touch with what was left of the Czech resistance, and cautiously planning their attack while trying to blend in.

There’s a subplot where in return for the offer of help with their mission, as a favour the assassins assist with a plan to bomb a Škoda factory. It’s a big risk, but they do it. They set fires to mark where a bomber airplane is supposed to hit at night. But the plane misses completely. A total waste of their time and effort and danger.

The assassins-to-be debate amongst themselves the morality of killing and the possible consequences of their actions, and there’s always an element of doubt. None of that samurai stupidity of, "Ours is not to question why, ours is just to do and die." They’re men who are far away from any higher authority, who have to decide things for themselves and wrestle with the weight of those decisions. A local resistance fighter who doubts their mission says that the Germans will take revenge, arrest and execute, and asks if the assassins have thought of that. Opálka says that he has, but it’s war so he doesn’t have the right to give up. My admiration and pity for him swell together in harmony.

One scene has the assassins meet in a movie theatre projection booth. Photos of mostly-forgotten movie stars from the Golden Age of Czech cinema hang on the walls.

One of the photos that’s easiest to recognize is of Lída Baarová, the beautiful star of films like Virginity (1937, directed by Otakar Vávra), who would be damned in Czechoslovakia after the war for her affair with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and only find work out of the country in films like Fellini's I Vitelloni. Supposedly Geobbels was ready to leave his Nazi life behind for the woman his own propaganda would have described as a ‘genetically inferior slav’, and Hitler himself had to step in to break up the tryst. The affair was dramatized in the recent film, The Devil's Mistress, and the romance of it comes across every bit as ridiculous as you might expect.

One detail glossed over in Atentát is that Kubiš and Gabčík would find girlfriends during their time in German-occupied Prague; Lenka Fafková and Marie Kovárníková. Girlfriends that they would be open about their mission with. Perhaps overlooked because Atentát is primarily focused on the mission, or perhaps because that detail of the story was not generally known at the time the film was made. In any case, Anthropoid plays up the romantic aspect, using it as a counterpoint to the unromanticized depiction of war. “War is not romantic,” Anna Geislerová as Fafková would even say during the film. I’d cringe at hearing a critic criticize the authenticity of her Czech accent. Anna Geislerová, the Czech actress who starred in the Oscar-nominated film Želary, about a resistance fighter during the war who goes to hide in the country. It’s critics like that who make me feel bitter about film critics.

Anyway, I do think that the assassins having girlfriends (Kubiš and Kovárníková would even become engaged) is interesting because it highlights that the men weren’t on a suicide mission. That they had aspirations for life beyond their objective, and periphery motivations while planning it. Somehow that feels more true to how Czech and Slovak people are. Maybe people in general, I don’t know. I’m not sure how much weight to put into the idea of a national character, but like the main character Miloš in Closely Watched Trains, it’s easy to imagine most Czechs putting ‘getting laid’ above other concerns that war might illicit. Look at 20th century Czech popular literature, like The Good Soldier Švejk or The Black Barons, and I think it’s apparent that war and soldiering were not things to be taken too seriously by Czechs.

Heydrich would frustratedly observe that it was difficult to tell what Czechs were thinking. That they would joke about anything. That they would ‘laugh all the way to the gallows’. Still there was the notion that most Czechs were ‘aryan enough’ to be Germanized***, and most Czechs were put in the unique position of being able to “join the Germans” as it was called.

Sometimes it seems that there’s a certain malleability to Czech identity. The ability to assimilate easily and blend in, might be considered virtues even. I wonder how many of the Czechs who declared themselves German did so for the perks that went along with that, and how many actually bought into that Nazi horseshit ideology. From what I’ve heard, at the time the Czechs who joined Germans were looked at more with embarrassment than anything else. I’d think about those two Czechs who had clearly joined the Germans during the opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Their hands in the air, saying the never killed anyone, asking not to be shot, but the Americans shoot them anyway. Poor schmucks. But mostly schmucks.

A Czech who had joined the Germans was also the subject of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Oskar Schindler (a member of the Nazi party and righteous person) who was born and raised in Moravia. His nationality is never commented on during the film, only a brief bit of text near the end would give it away to viewers unaware that he was not German. Still, maybe it’s confirmation bias on my part, but it seems as if something Czech seeps through in the way Schindler is presented in the film; his wheeling and dealing, the common sense and bourgeois values, maybe most especially his womanizing. Listen to the way Liam Neeson delivers Schindler’s “...It’s not that kind of kiss”. It has much the same quality as Daniel Day Lewis’ Tomas saying “Take off your clothes,” in Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. English-speakers approximating something Czech, but you get the idea.

That isn’t to say that the Czech’s who joined Germans were all secretly mostly-good natured opportunists. A person generally had to be a real asshole to want to trade in their Czech identity for a German one. I think of the Grand Guignol masterpiece, The Cremator, a film about a Czech cremator who sides with Germans and turns on his own friends and family. One subplot in the film is when he’s given an opportunity to declare himself German, but has no German ancestry. Yet “even a single drop of strong aryan blood” would suffice, so gradually he becomes more and more certain that he is German.**** All that being said, I look back to the undercover assassins in Atentát, playing the roles of subservient Czechs. At one point in the film, while scouting their target, riding their bicycles, they’re surprised to get a little too close to Heydrich who is riding on his horse. Hats are tipped and heads nod respectfully toward the man they had come a long way to kill.

Of course Heydrich doesn’t nod back. He ignores them completely. In researching the film, Jiří Sequens would interview people who had been in Heydrich’s staff or been in his presence; cooks, maids, gardeners etc. A useful detail they’d give him was that Heydrich would behave as if the Czechs on his grounds didn’t exist. I imagine Sequens a little like the assassins in his reconnaissance of Heydrich.

There’s a scene in which the assassins have a dry-run. To see if their chosen location will work, Gabčík walks past Heydrich’s car as it slows at a curve, staring directly at his target. It seems possible.

There’s also what may be a visual lift from the Holocaust film Transport From Paradise (which featured filmmaker Juraj Herz as an actor), creating a frame between a Mercedes hood-ornament and an SS flag.

The night before they plan to go through with the assassination, one of the men sends a radio transmission back to the government in England, Heydrich’s assassination would be of no value to allies. Unforeseeable consequences to nation. Requesting permission to call it off. There’s no reply. An unanswered prayer.***** At forty-nine minutes in, the exact half-way point of the film, the assassination scene begins. Their plan is to walk out in front of Heydrich’s car (license plate SS-3) as it slows at the curve, and blast him with a submachine gun. Simple.

The scene starts lax, as three of the assassins wait for their target, Gabčík, Kubiš and Valčík. They try to act natural and even whistle, but the anxiety is palpable, and gradually tension builds as Heydrich nears, and the inevitable moment of truth gets closer. In their pinstripe suits they look like gangsters, not soldiers. They’re there for a hit, and a Tommy Gun would look right at home in Gabčík’s hands, but unfortunately all he has is a Sten gun hidden under the jacket, draped over his shoulder. I suppose the bicycles aren’t very gangster either. Part of the reason for the location being chosen was so that they could go downhill for a speedy escape.

Valčík uses a mirror to signal that he sees Heydrich’s car approaching. Kubiš clutches a bag to his chest and tosses his cigarette as he watches his friend walk out into the road with the gait of someone who has rehearsed that moment many times in his own head. The gait of someone ready to put a bullet through the heart of a tyrant.

The horn honks as Gabčík approaches the car and flings off his jacket to reveal the submachine gun. Heydrich Braces himself as Gabčík pulls the trigger.

So what happens when you put a gun in the hands of the people of Kafka? It turns out it doesn’t go off. Go figure.

This would cement the Sten gun’s eternal reputation as a “piece of shit” amongst firearm aficionados. The gun isn’t even jammed, the trigger just clicks away pathetically. When reading why the assassins weren’t better equipped, I kept running into the horrible answer of ‘No one really thought they’d succeed. These sorts of missions never did.’ The whole situation seems more awful and more farcical every time I watch. Jiří Sequens would say that if one of his students came to him with a script that had a scene like that, he’d “send them away for such nonsense.”

At that moment Heydrich must have felt like a miracle had happened. It’s a horrible thing to be on the wrong end of a Deus Ex Machina. I’m sure if there was ever a time for Gabčík to feel like God wasn’t on his side, it was in that moment. Fortunately, Kubiš was at his side, and tosses a grenade pulled from his bag. The grenade doesn’t quite hit its target, but like they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

The primary victim of the blast is Heydrich’s car, but a few strands of horse hair from the car seat become shrapnel and pierce Heydrich’s back. Arched over, yelling in pain. There’s maybe another irony; Heydrich who had lived with Wagnerian grandiloquence, here looking like a parody of Seigfried’s death. Instead of a mighty spear, just splinters piercing his back. Again, history is a spectacular author.

Of course Heydrich doesn’t die there, his wound is minor, and the assassins are forced to flee. I think of the old proverb, kdo uteče ten vyhraje, he who runs wins. The scene ends, but in reality there was a bizarre shootout with Heydrich’s chauffeur who chased after them.****** The assassins leave thinking they failed in their mission, but this isn’t a story about failure, if only barely.

Heydrich’s wound would have been survivable if it were clean. I remember my father, a violin maker, telling me about horse hair for violin bows. That hair from a stallion’s tail was desired over hair from a mare’s tail, because the hair of a mare’s tail is filthy and pissed on all the time. I would guess it was cheap pissed-on mare’s tail hair used in the upholstery of that Mercedes, and that would enter Heydrich’s back. He’d be dead in a few days of sepsis.

It seems so right that Heydrich should die offscreen.

It’s interesting that the assassination sequence in Anthropoid has the same amount of screen time, and like Atentát seems to play in real time, though the emphasis is different. The moment where the gun fails to fire is stretched out for psychological effect, thought I prefer the drama of Atentát undercutting every ‘I would just walk up to him and shoot him, that’s what I would do’ daydream by having it all go to hell like a flash of lightning. That truth that the universe doesn’t care about your plans.

I do like that Anthropoid draws attention to the streetcar that was also hit by the grenade blast. Innocent people injured. You can see the streetcar in Atentát, but Anthropoid puts you inside of it. It feels like appropriate foreshadowing for all the innocent people who would unfortunately soon be dragged into this story.

Anthropoid also deviates from Atentát in its style. Its shakey-cam is perhaps better utilized than most films; less to artificially add kineticism as it is to build anxiety. There’s a visual correlation made in the film between the anxious shaking of Kubiš’ hands and the shaking of the camera. Atentát uses handheld camera as well, and it comes across less like an approximation of documentary (as in The Battle of Algiers which would come two years later), and more a necessary step to obtain the fluidity of an emotional camera that might be associated with filmmakers like Mikhail Kalatozov for instance. It might be said that Anthropoid has the ‘correct look’ for a realistic depiction of a history, but I think it’s become too much of a given that history on film should look realistic. Some histories are unmistakably formalist or expressionist or surreal.

Cinematographer Rudolf Milič deserves a mention. In the opening he is simply credited as ‘Milič’. He began his film career as a lab technician, and worked as a camera assistant or operator for the great cinematographers of 1930s Czechoslovak cinema; Jan Stallich, Jan Roth, Josef Střecha and Václav Vích. Milič would become renowned for his technical mastery, as well as an eye that was truly remarkable. Before shooting Atentát, he would collaborate with František Vláčil on The Devil's Trap. Vláčil would be described as “The Czech New Wave's formalist, post-expressionist wrecking ball” by Michael Atkinson in The Village Voice (what a perfect way to describe him!), and is best known for directing Marketa Lazarová. Atentát could easily be mistaken for a František Vláčil film, and I think much of that is because of Rudolf Milič. It’s unfortunate that after the 1968 Soviet invasion, his career would be greatly hampered (along with the rest of Czechoslovak cinema) and he would only find the odd job shooting television or cheap children’s musicals. He’d die at age 62, a squandered talent.

It’s the last act of Atentát where Milič’s cinematography (a certain lopsided, medieval sensibility) really shines. It’s easy to assume that the climax of a film about an assassination would be the assassination itself, but the story isn’t finished yet. No matter their nobility, actions like these have consequences. And it’s perhaps the consequences that the film is more about.

There’s a sequence recreating Heydrich’s funeral, complete with SS torchbearers, and a procession including an armoured car towing his coffin on top of howitzer (a word with Czech origins).

It seems surreal, a Nazi coffin on a canon. So absurd that I’d have to look at newsreel footage of the funeral just to confirm it really happened that way. Of course it did.

Heydrich’s widow is in the funeral scene, but I’m not sure which actor plays her. She’s only recognizable because of her black mourning veil.

It’s here that I think how strange it is that Mrs. Heydrich would attend a premiere of Atentát. Director Jiří Sequens described it as a delicate situation, uncertain of how the wife of the man his film was about killing would react. Apparently she was “neutral,” but she did say about the film, “Yes, it really was like that.”

The assassins find refuge in a church, the St. Cyril & St. Methodius Cathedral. The Baroque cathedral’s architect was Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer, who designed it with many concerns in mind, including the acoustic, the aesthetic, and even the tactical with the odd possibility of it being put under siege. There are seven parachutists in the cathedral, Čurda is missing. They dwell on what they believe is a failure.

There’s a juxtaposition with the film Valkyrie (which features Kenneth Branagh, but not as Heydrich), also based on true events about an attempt on Hitler’s life, with Tom Cruise playing the would-be assassin, Colonel Von Stauffenberg. You’d think that a man who had lost an eye and a hand in service of his country might be prepared to give up the rest of himself to kill the man who had corrupted it, but like Operation Anthropoid, Operation Walküre wasn’t a suicide mission. In that film, Von Stauffenberg leaves so certain that Hitler is dead, only to later discover he had failed. Great anguish would come in learning of that failure.

For the assassins in Atentát the anguish comes when they learn that they have succeeded. Hitler was enraged and Czechs would be hit with the full force of his blunt fury. Thousands would be taken hostage in an attempt to shake out the assassins, many killed, and the villages of Lidice and Ležáky would be obliterated. Bulldozers would erase any evidence they were ever there, and old maps show that their names had to be carefully blacked out. Men would be killed on the spot, women and children under a certain age would be sent off to death camps (with a handful of children selected to be adopted into German families). It’s horrific to think of everyone you know and you yourself being murdered arbitrarily for something you had nothing to do with. The dogs would be murdered too.

Even in death, the blood on Heydrich’s hands would mount. ‘Heydrichiada’ would enter the Czech lexicon as a word for especially brutal reprisal. There’s a recent film about the massacre of Lidice, just called Lidice. It would feature actor Detlef Bothe as Heydrich, who had previously played Heydrich in the television miniseries Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution', and would play Heydrich in Anthropoid as well. That reminds me a little of Christopher Lee playing Count Dracula so often.

The assassination of Heydrich is still an event of some controversy. It was generally accepted that Czechs could ride out the occupation and the war in relative comfort. Many would argue that the cost of life and hardships people would endure as a direct result of the assassination made it not worth it. Symbols can be worth so little, and actions can be worth so much, but where does that leave symbolic actions? It did erase any ambiguity that Czechs and Germans would be anything but enemies for the war. That Czechs were not content with being occupied. But it’s uncomfortably easy to say “Freedom is worth anything”, when you’re not the one who has to pay for it with your life or the lives of others. I think of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, when Erland Josephson’s character offers to sacrifice his family to save the world. What right do we have to sacrifice anyone but ourselves?

Of course, there’s the horrible alternative; that a man like Heydrich could exist and commit atrocities and rule with fear and sadism and murder, and be met only with passivity. It’s a moral maze that may not have an exit. At what point does the cost of doing ‘the right thing’ make it stop being ‘the right thing’? That’s not a rhetorical question, and it weighs heavily on the assassins in Atentát. Some raise the possibility of turning themselves in, in hopes that it would put an end to the bloodshed.

Kubiš suggests that he might go out to a park bench with a note explaining who he is and when the Germans come to capture him, he’d start shooting them until they kill him. Gabčík says he’d go with him, without a moment of hesitation, but Opálka shuts the whole idea down. Mostly there’s doubt and despair.

We are, all of us, damned. Most of all, the best of us who take on more than their fair share of the weight of the world.

Anthropoid has the men in that cathedral quoting Shakespeare, “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.” I suppose it’s possible, though it doesn’t exactly ring true. It feels more like an English conceit on the part of filmmaker Sean Ellis.

Meanwhile, the German investigation into the assassination is in full force. There’s a little bit of Fritz Lang’s M in the procedural elements; the systematic and ineffective scouring of the city.

Their tactics are especially brutal, but it’s not the brutality that would give the Germans a break in the case, it was the promise of an enormous reward to be given with the utmost discretion. Čurda paces back and forth in front of the Gestapo headquarters. When he steps in you know it’ll all be over soon.

The Nazis would pay Čurda, but rough him up as well. It sounds like something thrown in to make them look even worse, but apparently it really happened that way. I guess Gestapo can’t help themselves.

There’s a plan to sneak the seven parachutists out of the city, by using a hearse and hiding them in coffins. ‘Seven Coffins for Seven Men’ sounds like the title of some Italian Western, don’t you think? But while the seven men are waiting for their seven coffins, the Germans arrive in full force.

The Germans are here!

Kubiš is the first to see them and runs to warn the others. There’s hasty preparation for what’s about to come. Dread fills our Czechoslovak Seven Samurai. Kubiš, Opálka, and a third man will be topside, the other four will hide in the crypt. Opálka reminds them to save the last bullet for themselves.

There’s a handshake between Gabčík and Kubiš that turns into a brief hug. It’s a simple gesture, but a meaningful one; friends who had come so far together and who would have to go the final stretch apart.

Anthropoid, though ostensibly being a more character-driven approach to the story misses the obvious in never having a goodbye between Gabčík and Kubiš. It’s hard to think offhand what their final scene together was.

The Germans enter the cathedral, searching. The Czechs have positioned themselves on the second floor, overlooking the nave. There’s a long horrible tension as Opálka aims his pistol.******* It reminds me of the build up to the attempted assassination in the church at the climax of David Cronenberg’s adaptation of The Dead Zone. That anxiety of Opálka and we knowing that once he pulls the trigger, the shooting will come hard and fast and not stop until he’s dead. Pulling that trigger aimed at a Gestapo agent would be like pulling the trigger on himself. He pulls it and the shooting begins.

They repel the first wave of Germans, and there’s time for a cigarette as the Czechs barricade their only way back down and reload.

German machine guns turn the walls of the cathedral into Swiss cheese. I remember as a child, my parents took me to see that cathedral. It was closed when we were there, but those bullet holes were still visible. Even though I didn’t understand what had happened, those bullet holes left an impression on me.

SS stormtroopers rush into the church. A steady stream of them.

There’s a moment where I think again of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Specifically at its climax, when Eli Roth’s character fires a submachine gun into a crowd of Nazis, a look of intense rage in his eyes. The way Rudolf Jelínek plays his shooting from high above into Nazis below, he looks terrified out of his mind.******** These Nazis shoot back. At least the Sten guns work now. I’ve read that actually they didn’t have Sten guns in the church, only pistols. Then later I’d read that actually they did have Sten guns in the church. For today I’ll believe the film.

Then one of the Czechs is shot. He stumbles about in pain, but has the clarity of mind to pull out his pistol and shoot himself.

Death comes to all of us, but it comes harder for some of us.

Kubiš is hit by grenade shrapnel. Opálka asks if something’s wrong, and Kubiš says, “No, it’s good” before pressing his pistol to his temple. The camera pushes in on Opálka’s face as if it’s about to highlight his expression, but he looks away when the gunshot is heard of Kubiš taking his own life.

I think of Melvin Van Peebles relating an anecdote about a screening of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in Atlanta. He sat next to a woman he could overhear saying at the film’s climactic chase, “Let him die. Oh Lord, let him die. Don’t let those men kill him. Please let him die.” Fortunately, Sweetback would live to collect his dues another day. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here. I recite that woman’s prayer in my head as I watch this scene, and watch it again, and again.

Opálka is the only one left. How awful it must have been to be alone there. The stormtroopers are breaking their way up. Opálka takes a few shots at them, but it’s clear it’s the end for him. He scans the desecrated church.

I’m reminded here so much of the scene of violent aftermath in the cathedral in Andrei Rublev, which would be made two years later. I wonder if Andrei Tarkovsky had seen Atentát. Atentát won the Golden Prize at the 1965 Moscow International Film Festival, so I suppose it’s possible. I do at least know Robert Bresson liked the film.

Opálka places a cyanid capsule in his mouth and presses his pistol to his temple. His death is watched over by impotent icons.

I don’t think there was a god in that church, only martyrs and bullets.

For the men in the crypt, the silence is awful. They know what it means that the noise of combat has ceased above them. The men in the crypt might have survived the ordeal, hidden away, with the Germans initially assuming the three men they had killed were all there was. However Čurda was there to identify the bodies, and reveal that there were more men in that church.

The entrance to the crypt opens a crack, and the soft voice of Čurda creeps in. He pleads for the men down below to give themselves up and promises that they’ll be treated fairly as prisoners of war. The men answer by shooting in his direction.

“He sold us like Judas,” they would say. Instead of thirty pieces of silver, Čurda would make ten million crowns for his betrayal. And after the war, like Judas he would hang.

There’s a slot on the outside of the cathedral, too narrow for someone to get through, sliding down into the crypt. A heavy machine gun fires at it, but that doesn’t the Germans anywhere.

The Germans drop any pretence of warfare. Now they’re simply in problem solving mode, with the Czechoslovaks in the basement being the problem. Officers and officials discuss how best to proceed. Gas is used to try to flush them out, but proves ineffective. Then they recruit the local firefighters to flood the crypt with water. The hoses extend from the front of their firetruck like the tentacles of some horrible monster.

For the small dimensions of that crypt, it’s an apocalyptic flood. The end of the world for those men. Still there’s a nice touch, in that amidst their hopelessness, Valčík finds refreshment in the water meant to drown them.

The water rises, and there’s the sense that they’re sinking into the abyss, the absolute dark that we must all face some day. They’re in the maw of death itself, and its jaw is closing.

Everyone above ground acts like they’re involved in some public works project. Stormtroopers study architecture plans of the Cathedral. For a second time I think of that line in Conspiracy, “This is more than war. There must be a different word for this.” Extermination fits, but words are so inadequate.

The Germans plant explosives and blow through the ceiling of the crypt. Here it comes...

In the dark crypt, surrounded by ancient dead, Nazi fire above and the water rising higher and higher, knowing that the last bullet is the one they’ll have to put in their own head********* - it’s hard to think of a darker ending for those men. Like it couldn’t happen any other way. Once more, history is an author.

We hear the gunshots of the Czechoslovaks taking their own lives. Then immediately after we hear German music, Beethoven’s 5th symphony. It’s the failure of modernity, that the things that make us ‘civilized’ do nothing to remove us from our darker nature. Years later, A Clockwork Orange would expound on that conundrum of cruel men who could appreciate Beethoven.

In Anthropoid, Sean Ellis would go for a big Tarkovskian flourish. A vision of Lenka Fafková who had been killed in the reprisals, appearing to Gabčík, giving him the strength to shoot himself. A symbolic, lit candle being snuffed out by the rising water at the moment of death.

I like Anthropoid’s ending. It easily might not have worked, but Ellis pulls it off and it fits with his version of the story. Though the end title cards, I find off-putting.**********

Trying to hard-sell English audiences on the story’s relevance to them by tying it to Churchill’s declaration. It’s a disturbing fact too that it highlights; that prior to that declaration, the German take-over of Czechoslovak territories was considered ‘legal’ in their eyes, all because of that horrible betrayal of Czechoslovakia by France and England at the Munich conference. The betrayed having to prove themselves to their betrayer is another part of the cruel nature of this story. Miloš Forman at one point tried to make a film about the Munich conference, with Václav Havel (playwright, president, poet, and dissident), but then Havel died and unfortunately the project dissolved. Oh well.

Atentát ends without any further commentary or addendum. I’m grateful that it doesn’t try to impose context or conclusions to draw. In doing so, its scope extends beyond the boundaries of film. It leaves you in the dark, to dwell on the actions themselves. To consider those actions’ morality and significance in the film is to consider their morality and significance in history and to ourselves. The film becomes a conduit, to try to feel and understand some of what those men felt and thought. To go into the dark with them, and to not be lost when we find ourselves there.