Trooper twofer
IT SEEMS BLOODY FILMS ABOUT KILLING NAZI BOSS REINHARD HEYDRICH ARE LIKE BLOODY BUSES
Twin films might be a film-maker’s worst nightmare. You’re making your film, say about Truman Capote or defending the Earth against a giant asteroid or the assassination attempt on SS grandee Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, and you find out there’s a rival movie on the same subject on the go. Worse still, it’s due out at the same time as yours. What do you do? Film productions, like oil tankers, are too expensive and awkward to put in reverse, so you plough on and hope to win the race to screen, because the first-born tends to be the stronger.
And so we have Anthropoid, about the Heydrich assassination attempt, in cinemas this month, ahead of HHhH, on the same topic and due before the end of 2016. Anthropoid, named after the “Operation Anthropoid”, has Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy as its special agents charged with killing “the Butcher of Prague”. Their film is a slow-burning and possibly therefore highly realistic tale of wartime patience that takes a dramatic turn for the exciting in the final half-hour, when Dornan, Murphy and four resistance pals defend their cathedral hiding place against dozens of Nazis. It’s genuinely stirring stuff, which Jack O’Connell and Jack Reynor will have to be on best form to outdo in HHhH (which, with a starrier cast and higher budget, could prove an exception to the first-born rule).
Poor Toby Jones. When he delivered, by his own high standards, an outstanding performance as Truman Capote in 2006’s Infamous, hardly anyone saw it because the year before they’d seen the academy awardwinning performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the essayist and writer in Capote. Here in Anthropoid, Jones is the leader of the Czech resistance in Prague. If you’re planning to make a movie any time soon, you might want to check-in with Jones’s agent.
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Anthropoid is out on 9 September