Hangmen Also Die!

Moviecut—Hangmen Also Die!

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source: Hangmen Also Die!

Because of the assassination and an incorrect investigation by the Nazi's a little town outside of Prague, where the Reichmarshall was shot, was totally destroyed and wiped off the map. All males over the age of 15 were killed by firing squad. All women went to labor camps and the children of Lidice who were thought be able to be Germanized were sent into adoption against their wills. As I watch the movie Hangmen Also Die, I haven't seen the conclusion and don't know if it the village's destruction is mentioned. Since I have a great grandmother who came from that village long before the war I wanted to have it mentioned here. I have visited the site of the village, restored after the war and a memorial built there. The Nazi's own records show the horror of their acts.

The main problem of this movie is that its subject was the murder of Reinhardt Heydrich, and that the treatment was nowhere near strong enough. The only time we see Heydrich he is presented as a petty, chubby, swaggering fool. In actual fact he was an unchained Satan, a key ideologue and architect of Holocaust. He was a handsome man, and a very capable one, having flown nearly 100 missions in a Messerschmitt fighter, and an excellent fencer, swimmer, and violinist. His bloodthirstiness was unrivalled, clearly outstripping Heinrich Himmler. He was the organiser and chair of the Wannsee conference where the plans for the extermination of European Jewry were finalised. At the start of this movie I wondered whether the action was taking place in some obscure American suburb of Prague, such was the reliance on American idiom and drawl. Brian Donlevy as the assassin, usually a great noir player, is acting below himself so much so that one can't help be confused by him. The Gestapo inspector Alois Gruber is a total cardboard cutout. The movie consists almost entirely of the efforts of the Germans to uncover the assassin of Heydrich. The efforts of the Germans are so toned down that I stared in disbelief. The truth is that the Gestapo's main technique for forcing women to talk was group rape. Miss Novotny suffers not even so much as a Chinese burn. The reprisals are also sanitised, in reality the Germans as well as murdering or imprisoning over 10,000 hostages, killed every male over the age of 16 in the two villages of Lidice and Ležáky, burned the villages down and levelled the ruins. We must never forget the sheer vitriol of Nazism, to its credit the film did at least pay some lip service towards their efforts to Germanize the world. We must remember that their object was multi-genocidal, also the obliteration of all non-Germanic cultures, the obliteration of democracy, the obliteration of the family, the obliteration of the individual. They were not sausage-eating bullies, they were lucid death-worshipping fascists.

Supposedly, this film was suppressed in the USA because it came out in favor of the Communists. I just watched it today, and I can only remember one faint mention of the Russians (and don't forget, they were our allies at the time!). What must have really irked McCarthy was this film's scathing portrayal of those who snitch on their friends and co-workers, and those who coerce them into doing so. Gene Lockhart, whom I always think of as likable Bob Cratchit from the Reginald Owen "Christmas Carol," deserves high honors for his intense portrayal of a Czech traitor who works behind his neighbors' backs to betray them to the Nazi occupiers. Anna Lee is strong in her central role as the woman caught up in a dangerous plot. Many of the supporting characters also shine, such as Alexander Granach as the lusty Nazi enforcer Gruber. I couldn't quite warm up to Brian Donlevy in the central role. (He looks too much like an American businessman, like Raymond Bailey.) And Walter Brennan, although he looks great, seems out of place because of his heavy New England accent. What makes this movie a standout is the script and direction. There's not a wasted moment in this long film, and plenty of interesting set pieces (the theater, the cab ride/street confrontation, etc.). Brecht and Lang weave a web that grows larger but not looser as the film progresses.

Under the name 'Bert', Brecht teamed up with director Fritz Lang to craft this cunning and ultimately suspenseful tale that borders more than consciously on propaganda, but for all the right reasons considering the period. It wasn't a period piece but something urgent of the time and place- not to mention a stark battle cry from Lang, who fled Germany in 1934 following a calling from Goebbels to become the propaganda filmmaker of the 30s- and it stands still as one of those under-seen pieces where loyalties and betrayals and double-crosses and vendettas are all abound, and the truth is something tricky and twisty on either side. The main plot concerns the dramatized story of Reinhard Heydrich, the "hangman", who is then put on by the Nazis as a figure of the past to haunt the Czech people: the assassin MUST be found. The assassin is Dr. Franticek Svoboda, aka Karel Vanek, who may also have another alias, and is well played by Donelvy, who hides with a Czech professor (Brennan) via a chance meeting weeks before with Nasha (Anna). Once he escapes following a curfew that night, many people are rounded up- hundreds- to be executed by the Nazis if the assassin isn't taken in. Anna's family is questioned, her father on the list of those to soon be killed, but what of Svoboda (and the resistance, or the cruel Nazis at the gestapo for that matter)? I t's a typical Langian procedural in the very tense and exacting sense, and it's a lot of tense fun and there's always a sense of danger with how the characters cross one another in one scene to the next (I loved when Vanek comes back to Anna after the first night, she's mad at him, but this is right after she's been questioned by cruel Gruber, performed by Granach as half caricature and half power-hungry monster, and there is a wire to her apartment, only to have him feed her lines through index cards). It's just as intense as a more modern espionage thriller, only Lang has the upper-hand at crafting it with an equal hand of social indictment (like M or Fury, the people in the Czech city have a role to play in what happens, and there's great scenes of small mobs going crazy like in the movie theater) and of a more general grilling of the sadistic Nazis. There's not much room to make them very three-dimensional, however Hangmen Also Die! features the Nazis performed not in very simplistic ways. Maybe my favorite is the traitor- a Nazi collaborator played by the large Gene Lockhart who can go from being happy-go-lucky to frantic and pushy on a dime, and is the total puppet of the sneaky inspector Gruber, who is funniest when trying to get back to sleep following a night of frivolity with some girls. The storyline isn't completely free of a few heavy lines of dialog, and the whole sub-plot involving the 'is she seeing someone else' thinking for Jan Horak (O'Keefe, best at looking stone-faced in semi-shock) who is the fiancé of Nasha is the least effective of the lot. But what is here is a striking example of balancing real thrills (it's hard not to be on the edge of your seat in the last fifteen to twenty minutes, mostly as characters talk if not in tense cat-and-mouse theatrics) and a great message at hand. Lang makes this a story meant to pull people into action- the film ends with "NOT" and then super-imposed "THE END"- and like with M, there's many a moment when the common-folk, like a maid or a taxi driver or butler, become the real heroes in saying who was where or what one did at a given time. And of course Lang is also totally on top of his game at crafting this with many images of sadistic shadows (watch as Nasha is prisoner and a guard comes into a second shot in silhouette) and enclosing angles.

This is loosely based on the true story of a member of the Czech underground assasinating the nazi regional governer, a ruthless fellow they call 'the Hangman'. The story revolves around the assasin and the family that unknowingly hid him from the gestapo. When questioned by the gestapo, the family says the guy was there to see their daughter, who happens to be engaged to another fine gentleman. So this little situation complicates the story, as the gestapo detective,a very ruthless chap, tries to catch them in the lie. From there the story moves along in chilling fashion when 400 townfolks are rounded up to be executed in groups of 10 each day until the assasin is turned in. This causes people to question their inner strength and makes them wonder if it is worth it to sacrifice themselves to keep him hidden. The story gets resolves in a very clever way which I will not reveal. The movie has that film noir/Hitchkockian feel to it with the protagonist being chased down and making clever escapes by the skin of his teeth. Although the movie drags a bit here and there, it ends up being a worthwhile suspenseful drama and also makes you think a bit about what would you do if you were put in that situation.

This 1943 film, inspired by the real life assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi ruler of Czechoslovika, is disappointing, namely for the waste of talent. The fact that the film bears no relationship to the historical facts, is excusable; this is after all, a World War II propaganda film; few films of that period accurately portrayed the events of the time. No, the worst thing about the film was Fritz Lang's heavy handed direction. Lang was the most German of the German film directors, who migrated to Hollywood during the nineteen twenties and thirties. Here, Lang reverts to the old high style German touch of strange angles, and 1920's post-war Weimar expressionism, to gloss over a Hollywood pot-boiler. It doesn't work. The film is totally self conscious of it's own "artiness." Lang did great work in some American films -- this was not one of them.

One of a handful of propaganda films made by Hollywood during WWII to show how various occupied European countries dealt with the situation; similar films included THE MOON IS DOWN (1941), EDGE OF DARKNESS (1943), THE NORTH STAR (1943) and THIS LAND IS MINE (1943). This one, however, differs from these in that it tackles a real-life event i.e. the assassination of Heydrich - dubbed "The Hangman" (his assassination was the subject of two more films, the contemporaneous HITLER'S MADMAN [1943] and OPERATION DAYBREAK [1975]) - and is further elevated by the contribution of two important figures of pre-war German art, director Lang and writer Bertolt Brecht. It also features a great cast (mostly delivering excellent performances, but is saddled with a miscast and rather stiff Brian Donlevy in the lead): Walter Brennan and Gene Lockhart are featured in overly familiar roles but their contribution is, as ever, reliable and entirely welcome; best of all, perhaps, are Anna Lee and Alexander Granach; beloved character actor Dwight Frye (most familiar to horror-film buffs) appears here in one of his last roles but, as was generally the case, is regrettably given only a couple of lines! Long and heavy-going, with the propagandist element coming off as fairly corny now, but the film is held firmly together by Lang's fine direction and James Wong Howe's superb noir-ish lighting (the Region 1 DVD by Kino was eventually re-issued as part of a 5-Disc Noir set). It also involves a couple of scuffles which are quite tense and energetic (Granach's death scene is especially striking), while the last third resorts to the organized frame-up by the Czechs of a traitor in their midst (collaborationist Lockhart) - which, in itself, is no less frightening an act than the heinous persecution of the Nazi regime! I'm confused, however, about the film's running-time: the print I watched ran for 129 minutes in PAL mode (which would bring it to about 134 minutes when converted to NTSC); even so, it contains the ending missing from the DVDs released in Regions 1 and 2 which, being the same version i.e. cut and having the same length (134 minutes), would indicate that the Kino edition is a PAL conversion - which means a full running-time of 139 minutes (a minute short of the 'official' length, as per Lotte Eisner's book on Lang)! To make matters worse, both the Leslie Halliwell and Leonard Maltin film guides I own cite HANGMEN ALSO DIE! as being 131 minutes long!!