March 19, 2024 – Sir Anthony Hopkins stars as Sir Nicholas Winton, a real hero, in this historical drama about the rescue of refugee children from Czechoslovakia and the murderous clutches of the Nazis, just before the outbreak of World War II.

This movie, directed by James Hawes, is comprised of two complimentary halves. The first part is set in 1988, as Winton (Hopkins) is being asked by his wife Greta (Lena Olin of “Chocolat”) to clear out a lot of boxes of old records from his house. The second part of the movie is shown in a series of flashbacks to 1938, when Winton (played as a young man by Johnny Flynn of “Emma”) is working to rescue children in Czechoslovakia.

In 1938, Winton travels to Czechoslovakia as a volunteer to help at the Prague office of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC). When he sees the terrible conditions of the refugees, mostly Jewish, he offers to arrange for the transport of children from Czechoslovakia to England, and to arrange for foster care of the children in England.

BCRC officials, including Doreen Warriner (played by Romola Garai “Suffragette”) head of the Prague office, tell Winton that there are too many obstacles to his plan, including a lack of passports, travel documents, money for transportation and foster care, and there are also a host of bureaucratic hurdles to his plan. In addition, authorities who have documents on the refugees won't share their lists because of the fear German spies getting lists of Jewish refugees.

Winton, however is undeterred by such obstacles. He and his mother, Babi Winton (Helena Bonham Carter of “Ocean's Eight”) get to work clearing obstacles in both England and Czechoslovakia. Babi works on publicity, fund-raising, and getting British bureaucrats to provide the necessary clearances, while her son works on getting a list of refugees, and getting train transportation to the coast through the Netherlands.

Winton returned to England just before the war began, and continued working on transit papers, fund-raising, publicity, and arranging for foster care for nearly 670 children who were successfully sent to England, with the aid of Warriner, Trevor Chadwick (played by Alex Sharp of “Living”) and others in the BCRC.

Yet Winton is haunted by the thousands of lives he was unable to save. On the day Germany invaded Poland, setting off World War II, 250 children were on the train in Prague, ready to leave, when German soldiers boarded the train and took them off, ending the rescue attempt. Of those 250 children whose escape was blocked, only two survived the war. Maybe 2,000 more could have been saved if the United States would have agreed to take refugees as England did.

Fifty years have passed after the start of World War II and Winton, Warriner, Chadwick and others have all been forgotten, and Winton is the last of the three left alive. According to his wife's wishes, he gets rid of most of his old BCRC-related documents, except for a scrapbook of names and pictures of the rescued children.

He offers the scrapbook to Holocaust researcher Elizabeth Maxwell (Marthe Keller of “Marathon Man”) whose husband, Robert Maxwell, runs a media empire. Elizabeth managed to contact a number of those that Winton had helped to rescue. The scrapbook ends up in the hands of the BBC, which publicizes Winton's exploits.

The emotional highlight of the film is one of his appearances on a BBC show, called “That's Life,” where he is surprised to find himself surrounded by a large number of people he had helped to save 50 years earlier.

The fact is that Winton only came to represent the entire rescue operation because he lived so long (he lived to be 106 years old). Those who faced real danger in the work of rescuing the children, like Warriner and Chadwick, had died in the 1970s, long before their heroism became widely known.

The movie gets around this problem by making Winton appear very humble and by emphasizing his anguish over the fate of the 250 on the last trainload of refugees, and the fact that the number of people he helped to save was only a tiny fraction of those he wanted to save.

Despite the fact that this film's narrative is like a ping pong ball bouncing back and forth between 1988 and 50 years earlier, it works well. All the flashbacks provide the context to what is happening to Winton in 1988, and they provide background to the legacy of the rescue operation. The screenplay by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is based on the book, “If It's Not Impossible … The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton” by Barbara Winton.

Hopkins, Olin, Bonham Carter, Garai and Sharp all give strong performances in this movie about the distant past that is still relevant to events happening today. This movie rates a B.

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