THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART AND NO PERSONALITY

The new film from French director Cédric Jiminez (The Connection, Aux Yeux De Tous) represents nothing but a series of opportunities to tell an interesting story which has been squandered through equivocation in narrative and a lack of detail in its script.

The Man With The Iron Heart, abbreviated to HHhH, has so many problems it is hard to know where to start; it is poorly edited, the nominally stellar cast is restrained by hamfisted writing and poor character development and it is difficult to discern what point, if any, the writer-director is trying to make.

The story centres on the 1942 assassination, in Prague, of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. We are given some snapshots of his former life as a Navy officer, his rise through the ranks of the NSDAP, and his ascension to the top echelons of the National Socialist hierarchy.

This series of badly constructed jump cuts, flashbacks and flashes forward, introduces Jason Clarke as Heydrich, Rosamund Pike as his wife Lina, and the always excellent Stephen Graham as an eerily realistic Heinrich Himmler.

The trouble with this opening sequence, however, is that the writers assume that the viewer already knows who the characters are, the timeline of NSDAP history, and the events which led up to Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933; we are confident that the average moviegoer would have no idea where, say, Ernst Röhm or Heinrich Müller fit into the story.
Röhm and Müller appear as pop-up characters for mere seconds of screentime in HHhH, Hitler is absent altogether and highly significant events, such as the “Night Of The Long Knives” are glossed over in a way which might leave the average punter scratching his head in confusion over what he had just watched.
Clarke’s Heydrich comes across as a flat, even passive character; he is sometimes annoyed, sometimes explosively violent but he never has anything really profound or interesting to say.

We would assume that the writers were aiming for a steely, near psychopathic aura for the character, but the result is a dull and listless cartoon of a man whose personal motivations and deeper thoughts are never made clear.

Moreover, Jiminez plays it so safe with his “Holocaust” narrative that he almost strays into the area of heresy by the omission of pertinent details of the (((official))) WW2 story.

The repression of Czech resistance, the police actions and mass killings carried out by Heydrich’s SS units are, remarkably, even turned into boring vignettes in HHhH; to anyone familiar with the real story the film goes close to exculpating senior NS officials by effectively cutting them out of the picture.
You see, in opposition to the mainstream, Hollywood inspired story of the Holocaust there is a school of thought which puts forth the idea that the Final Solution was a criminal conspiracy carried out by elements within the SS in pursuit of their own objectives; that the true magnitude of the mass killings and ethnic cleansing was deliberately kept from Hitler and his inner circle.

By omitting Hitler from the film the director has, perhaps unwittingly, veered into forbidden territory. If the viewer is paying attention, he could easily form the impression that Heydrich really was the sole architect of the planned destruction of native Czech culture and the liquidation of ethnic minorities within his area of responsibility.

The second half of the film is utterly forgettable in spite of the introduction of some fine actors into the cast; Mia Wasikowska, Jack Raynor and Jack O’Connell form the nexus of the Czech resistance plotline but that too falls flat and fails to make an impact on the viewer, there is simply not enough meat on the bones of the characters for the script to be effective.

In contrast to HHhH we recommend the excellent film Anthropoid. The 2016 feature directed by Sean Ellis examines in detail the actual plot to assassinate Heydrich which was led by resistance fighters and British trained Czech special forces soldiers Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcíc.

Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy are altogether more convincing as Kubis and Gabcíc, their operation, codenamed Anthropoid, takes place amid a far more fraught atmosphere, a vision of Prague riddled with collaborators, cowardly resistance turncoats and Gestapo spies.

The supporting cast, though lacking the big names of HHhH are equally impressive; Charlotte Le Bon and Anna Geislerova acquit themselves well in their roles as resistance sympathisers Marie and Lenka, who sacrifice everything they hold dear to free their country.
Due to superior writing, it is what is said in Anthropoid, as opposed to what is explicitly shown, but poorly explained in HHhH that drives home to the viewer the horrors inflicted upon the people of Czechoslovakia by the National Socialists.

The impact of the SS reprisals against those who aided Heydrich’s assassins as depicted in the former film is far more dramatic than in the latter simply because by the climax of the film one has begun to sympathise with the characters in Anthropoid, due to their being more well rounded and the actors working from a better-prepared script.

In the end, HHhH is a badly made Holocaust drama which fails to land any of its punches due to the limitations of that genre, even though it does appear, to the trained eye at least, to bend that tiresome narrative to some extent.

Anthropoid, on the other hand, is a film Australian Nationalists may relate to, being as it is a depiction of where true patriots can be taken in their fight for a free country; it shows in graphic detail the sacrifices required of resistance fighters in a struggle against a tyrannical colonial power bent on crushing the native society.

There is much in the story of Kubis and Gabcíc and the wider European resistance movements against National Socialist and, later, Soviet imperialism which should inspire Nationalists everywhere, Anthropoid, as an entertaining piece of popular culture is a good place to start.
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