Operation: Daybreak

In Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich takes charge of the territory of Bohemia and Moravia, bringing a wave of terror down on its people. Faced with his brutality, a group of Czech soldiers who had fled to Britain are sent back into their homeland. They parachute into the countryside, make contact with the local resistance, and set about planning an attack on Heydrich himself. The film follows the preparation and execution of that mission and the heavy reprisals that followed it. The story is based on the real assassination of Heydrich, and the Czech fighters Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik are its central figures.

Lewis Gilbert directed the film, working from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, with Carter DeHaven producing. It sits between The Adventurers and The Spy Who Loved Me in Gilbert's filmography. Timothy Bottoms plays Kubis and Anthony Andrews plays Gabcik, while Martin Shaw appears as Karel Curda, Anton Diffring as Heydrich, and Joss Ackland and Nicola Pagett among the supporting cast. The credited cast runs to 28 names, and the production involved companies from Belgium, the United States and Czechoslovakia, including the Barrandov studio in Prague.

Made in the mid-1970s, the film runs 118 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7 out of 10 from around 2,600 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.9 out of 10 from a much smaller base of about 50 votes, so the two audiences are broadly in agreement about its quality.