Hangmen Also Die
by Fritz Lang
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anna Lee, Brian Donlevy, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Nana Bryant, Walter BrennanDirector: Fritz Lang
Brand: Kino International
Cinematographer: James Wong Howe
Producer: Fritz Lang
Writer: Fritz Lang
Producer: Arnold Pressburger
Producer: Theo. W. Baumfeld
Writer: Bertolt Brecht
Writer: John Wexley
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 134 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-01-18
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 1432
Studio: Kino Video
Product features:
- HANGMEN ALSO DIE (DVD MOVIE)
Movie Reviews of Hangmen Also Die
Movie Review: why the end titles are ironic, etc.
Summary: 5 Stars
Classic Expressionist images and sly situations by Fritz Lang; cinematography by James Wong Howe; propaganda poetry by Bertolt Brecht (so nice they recite it twice in succession, in case we've missed the point)--HANGMEN ALSO DIE is irresistable!
The story was inspired by the actual assassination of Reinhard Heydrick, who had earlier appeared as himself in Riefenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. It's interesting to note that Heydrick continued to have a successful film career for another fifty years, for he also appears posthumously in at least eleven more motion pictures!
Some reviews complain about Brian Donleavy's alleged "lethargic" performance, though I found it consistent with his other straightforward work and quite acceptable. It's peculiar, however, to witness the Czech underground played with so many extremely American faces and mannerisms--Donleavy and O'Keefe in particular. I've never been a fan of Walter Brennan, between the geezer impersonations and his politics; but he does do very well in what elsewhere would be the "Walter Huston" role (NORTH STAR, DRAGON SEED, and others). If any non-German actor's performance seems weaker than others, it's Anna Lee's. But this entire topic only arises because the performances by German actors are so excellent.
In writings of Hollywood (notably Gore Vidal's SCREENING HISTORY and Waugh's THE LOVED ONE), much has been made of the British colony of actors and writers whose films before and during WW2 consciously endeavored to increase American sympathy and support for their homeland. But there's an unusual fascination in watching German actors (not to mention Fritz Lang and "Bert" Brecht) pulling out all the stops in this project.
Much is justifiably made of Hans Heinrich Twardowski's dazzling impersonation of Reinhard Heydrick at the beginning of the movie, which makes the "Nazis" of Otto Preminger, Conrad Veidt, and Erich von Stroheim look like Gandhi, but my "favorite" Nazi in the film is the satirical limning of a Gestapo officer in charge of "questioning" a couple key female suspects. Priceless! As is the performance of the old-lady grocer who refuses to rat out Anna Lee. She, the girl's gossipy aunt, and the Nazi in charge of the investigation have all stepped out of earlier Lang films (M, FURY, etc.) and bring tremendous Old World authenticity to their roles.
The final irony lies in the film's end-title. As Amazon notes, after the plot's presumed climax the end-title challenges whether this is REALLY the end of the story. In truth, the original film was several minutes longer, and included the execution of the hostages. Too grim for war propaganda of 1943? (Some suggest it was excised perhaps before its release in Europe; and it's known that HUAC banned the movie as possibly pro-Communist, and that the American public was "protected" from it for decades.) Or perhaps the studio said Genug already, for a film that's well over two hours long even WITH the snipping?
Doubtless that lopping contributed to Brecht's dissatisfaction with the final product. Meanwhile, the German-speaker who was hired to help him with the project, John Wexley, was indeed a Communist and, like Brecht, was later brought before HUAC--though with more dire consequences.
Summary of Hangmen Also Die
HANGMEN ALSO DIE - DVD MovieBecause it's been little seen, and because people tend to shrug off contemporaneous World War II films as "propaganda," Hangmen Also Die has never received its due. It's a brilliant, riveting movie, made in response to the atrocities committed against the Czech people following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich, Hitler's personal "hangman." Under Fritz Lang's ferociously stylized direction, the duel of wits between the Nazi occupiers and the Prague underground--"a ghost army sworn to haunt them till their blood runs cold"--becomes the stuff of legend: virtually another installment of Die Nibelungen, and a dynamic variation on the urban phantasmagoria of the Mabuse films and Spione and M.
There is propaganda--but when the blood-curdling rhetoric comes from Bertolt Brecht, no less, in his only movie script for an American producer, who's to complain? Lang was Brecht's full collaborator, however, and the narrative is a steel trap closing on everyone. Every act of charity may potentially doom an entire family, and the resistance fighters--especially Brian Donlevy's doctor-assassin--agonize over their culpability in jeopardizing hundreds of innocents taken hostage in reprisal for Heydrich's shooting. The moral-ethical duality extends to the casting, and our response to it. Apart from Walter Brennan, astonishingly "Brechtian" as a Czech professor of history, the "good guys" are ho-hum Central Casting types while the Nazis--evil incarnate--are juicily portrayed by a passel of German-Jewish émigrés (Alexander Granach, Reinhold Schünzel, Ludwig Donath, et al.), all savoring the opportunity to skewer their own oppressors and to act up a German Expressionist storm in their Hollywood exile. Superbly photographed by James Wong Howe. --Richard T. Jameson
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