Lewis Gilbert (1975)
I was already feeling depressed entering the York ABC for the double bill of Operation Daybreak and The Master Gunfighter. The adverts didn’t improve things. In Pearl & Dean’s repulsive ‘Welcome Home’, a pretty young woman and a smart young man enjoy a spiritual experience watching their home in the early stages of construction and envisaging its final, flawless reality. As a pin is inserted into a piece of wood, the heroine muses, ‘Just think: those little pegs are our future’. Nails and coffins come to mind but the couple carry on rhapsodising – ‘It will be clean and new, our very own’. The script might have been written by Margaret Thatcher. ‘Welcome Home’ is presumably being shown nationwide. It’s a relief – the audience laughs – when a local postscript pricks the Utopian balloon with the words ‘R D Pilcher & Son of Haxby’ appearing on the screen. A relief too that this commercial is so technically crappy. The grainy, jumpy film makes the dream house look extremely ugly. The advert ends with an anti-climactic shot of the man’s shoes on the doormat.
A mixture of unintentional laughs and well-staged action sequences, Operation Daybreak dramatises events leading up to and following the assassination of the German general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942. Ronald Harwood’s screenplay is adapted from a book by Alan Burgess, Seven Men at Daybreak. The plan to assassinate Heydrich, the Nazis’ administrative chief in occupied Czechoslovakia, is devised in Britain: three young Czech men – Jan Kubis, Jozef Gabcik and Karel Curda – are to carry out the killing. A striking feature of the story, in spite the film’s many generic scenes, is how much goes wrong with Operation Daybreak[1], even at the climax. The two assassins (Curda has turned traitor) ambush Heydrich’s car and Gabcik prepares to shoot but his machine-gun jams. He escapes, pursued by Heydrich’s chauffeur. Kubis then throws a grenade at the car and gets caught in the blast – though so too, and with fatal results, does Heydrich. Only at the very end, cornered in a church crypt and resisting the Nazi horde with seemingly inexhaustible ammunition, do Kubis and Gabcik seem more conventional screen heroes. The celebrated cinematographer Henri Decaë did the austere lighting. Thelma Connell’s editing seems unambitious in the finale, compared at any rate with The Day of the Jackal, the last assassination-plot drama I remember seeing. At the end, Lewis Gilbert inserts documentary footage as part of a summary of the Germans’ response to the death of Heydrich, including the complete destruction of the town of Lidice.
Operation Daybreak is entertainingly skewed by the casting, at least for those of us who watch plenty of television. Cyril Shaps, a small-time Jewish businessman in numerous small-screen dramas and comedies, is a gallant priest. William Lucas, the heroine’s doctor father in Black Beauty, is a very different medic here. Best of all is Diana Coupland, who plays a resistance stalwart. Her first line is, ‘Call me Aunt Marie – everyone else does’, but she remains Jean, Sid James’s wife in Bless This House. The two main assassins are Timothy Bottoms and Anthony Andrews. Whereas Bottoms tries and fails to convince with some kind of European accent, Andrews is straightforwardly a dashing young British regiment officer. These two aren’t the only reasons why, as the film goes on, it starts to seem that the Czechs are heroes only if they’re obviously Anglo-American. With his dark beard and quiet voice, Martin Shaw, as the third assassin, has a more exotic quality and he turns out to be the treacherous one. The ethnic confusion is such that it’s almost reassuring to see the archetypal Aryan Anton Diffring in the role of Heydrich. I thought for a while that George Sewell (Special Branch) was playing Hitler but must have got this wrong because his character’s moustache disappears halfway through. The Nazis also include Philip Madoc, familiar from roles ranging from Magua in The Last of the Mohicans to an Afrikaans tyrant in The Goodies. Nicola Pagett (Upstairs, Downstairs) is enjoyably sparky as the resistance worker who falls in love with the Anthony Andrews character. There’s a genuinely good performance from Pavla Matéjuvská, a real Czech, as Aunt Marie’s frail-looking but courageous daughter.
Tom Laughlin, who made Billy Jack and The Trial of Billy Jack, is once more a loner in The Master Gunfighter. The film, which claims to be ‘part fact, part fiction but mostly interpretation’, is set in southern California in the 1830s. The protagonist is Finley (Laughlin), an ace gunfighter and swordsman, who attempts to prevent the massacre by a group of Latino ranchers of the Chumash Indian tribe. The folksy familiarity of the narrative voiceover (from Burgess Meredith) can’t conceal the fact that Laughlin’s storytelling is all over the place. The Master Gunfighter is a weird mishmash of Western and Samurai mythology. Laughlin plays Finley with excruciating seriousness – as if in disapproval of the sundry atrocities that, as director, he’s put on the screen. The result is still very boring and I fell asleep for a while. I was awake when, about twenty-five minutes before the film was due to end, someone on the screen said a line that included the words ‘no choice but to leave’. I took the hint.
[1976]
[1] Afternote: It was actually ‘Operation Anthropoid’: the name was presumably changed for commercial reasons, with a nod to the title of the Alan Burgess book.
