A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

On 27 May 1942, at a tight street corner in Prague, two resistance parachutists - the Czech Jan Kubiš and the Slovak Jozef Gabčík stopped an open top car carrying the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich with the intention of carrying out the most high profile assassination of the Second World War. The consequences - both personal and political - were enormous. Kubiš and Gabčík, together with five other parachutists, eventually found refuge in an orthodox church near the city centre, but they were betrayed by one of the other parachutists and all died in the shoot-out with the SS. My strong interest in the assassination is because it took place at the height of the wartime exploits of my Czech night fighter pilot father-in-law, so that I included a couple of paragraphs about it in my biography of him, and the church in which the assassins Kubiš and Gabčík died is literally at the end of the street in which my closest Czech friends live, so that I have visited it several times.The year after the assassination which made massive world news, Hollywood rushed out two films - "Hangmen Also Die" and "Hitler's Madman" - which gave highly fictionalised accounts of the event and its aftermath. In 1964, there was a Czech film called "Atentát". "Operation: Daybreak" - released in 1975 - therefore was the fourth project to bring this slice of history to the big screen. Although Czechoslovakia was still under communist control at the time, the largely British movie was shot on location in Prague with the support of Czech actors and technical crew. The main source material was "Seven Men At Daybreak", written by British author Alan Burgess and published in 1966, and the director is Lewis Gilbert who helmed three James Bond films around this time. Kubiš and Gabčík are played respectively by the American Timothy Bottoms and the British Anthony Andrews, while Heydrich - a major architect of the Final Solution - is portrayed by the German-born Anton Diffring whose father was in fact Jewish.Although much of the acting is merely average and most of the dialogue is somewhat stilted, unlike the earlier English-language films on this subject, "Operation: Daybreak" has an essentially accurate narrative, even if some characters are brought together and some events are invented for dramatic effect and, of course, much of the detail of the shoot-out in the church - which is especially well-done - must be speculative. I have seen the film three times now and still find it evocative and moving. The bravery of the parachutists and those who supported them, the brutality of the German reaction to the assassination, and the echoes of the events through post-war communist Czecholsvakia and the democratic Czech Republic underline the worthiness of this work.

We visited Prague last month as part of a tour of the "Blue Danube" which included Vienna and Budapest. Prague is one of the most fascinating and beautiful cities we've ever seen, and the tour guides showed us the church where the commandos took refuge, and also mentioned the legend of the crown of Saint Wenceslas (where Heydrich puts in on his head) at Prague Castle. Since we returned I've been reading up on the incident, and ordered the DVD from Korea. For an older, low budget film, they did a very good job in sticking to the true story. The music was a little annoying, and it's too bad they didn't have subtitles for the German characters. I'm reading a book on the fate of Lidice, and found an excellent publication from the Czech Ministry of Defense web site called "Assassination: Operation Anthropoid 1941-42". It can be downloaded at www.army.cz.

Was this the movie on HBO, at the earliest years of HBO, where the two assassins are held up in a room that is being flooded by the Germans. The last scene, they take their own lives and you see poker cards floating in the water as it is rising.I have been trying to figure out what movie that was. I was glued to the screen when I was young, but cant remember what the name of the movie was. The movie as I recall, was two assassins that were sent to take out a German Officer, and they attempted at a train station. I cant remember if they succeeded, but they did not get away and were held up in a house, probably a basement.

A fantastic film. I first saw it about 15 years ago and remembered being extremely moved by it, then I recently bought it off the web and watched it again. It was every bit as stirring.The strengths of this movie lie in the beautiful simplicity of the performances. The characters exude courage and patriotism, set against the backdrop of the savage and brutal Nazi regime in Czechoslovakia during WWII. The score is also beautiful and touching in equal measure.What really hits home however, is when you realise that this is a true story. Everything dramatised in the film actually happened. The director (Lewis Gilbert) is intelligent enough to realise that only the lightest of touches are required, there are no grandiose set pieces - he lets the narrative and the characters' emotions speak for themselves. The ending is utterly heart-rending, but the film as a whole stands as the most inspiring tale of valour against hopeless odds. Watch it when you get the chance, you will never forget it.