Operation Anthropoid, the 1942 assassination of high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters, was a military operation that, despite achieving its primary objective, had enough bungling and unintended consequences that it served as the basis for a Jim Shepard story. The machine gun jammed, the grenade didn’t land where it was supposed to, the pistol bullets missed their marks. Heydrich lived for a week, seemed to be getting better, and then abruptly died for as-yet-unknown reasons. The Nazis couldn’t find the assassins right away (one escaped on bicycle, the other by running into a butcher shop) so they responded by killing as many as 5,000 civilians, wiping an entire town off the map. There are certainly more depressing stories about Nazis, but it’s not Indiana Jones, or even Valkyrie.
Despite the somewhat ambiguous results of Operation Anthropoid, German exiles made two films about Heydrich’s assassination the very year after it happened: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die and Douglas Sirk’s Hitler’s Madman. Now writer/director Sean Ellis and co-writer Anthony Frewin are joining their ranks with Anthropoid, whose first trailer was just released. The trailer makes it look like standard period thriller fare, so it will be interesting to see how it deals with an operation in which virtually everything went wrong. Anna Geislerová and Charlotte Le Bon co-star in the film, which will be in theaters Aug. 12.
