Hangmen Also Die!

I love war movies made during the war they portray. They're usually unabashed propaganda, bold strokes painted with primary colors. The stories are the ones that matter today, and will sometimes be buried by history. The bad guys are ruthless, invincible, menacing without the benefit of hindsight. It's like Red Riding Hood meeting the wolf.

Fritz Lang's 1943 HANGMEN ALSO DIE is one such film. Based on a true story, it's a moving tale set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. The Reichprotektor Heydrich has been assassinated and the Gestapo is conducting a massive investigation to apprehend the killer.

Frustrated in their search, and by the Czech resistance, the Gestapo rounds up 400 hostages and begin executing them at regular intervals until the assassin in apprehended. Brian Donlevy plays the killer, Dr. Franticek Svoboda, Anna Lee the young woman who inadvertently (at first) throws the authorities off his trail, and Walter Brennan plays Prof. Stephen Novotny, Anna Lee's father and one of the four hundred hostages.

The Nazis in HANGMEN ALSO DIE were played by Jewish actors, refugees from a hostile Europe. Whether brooding over a pimple on the cheek, annoyingly cracking knuckles while tormenting a poor old vegetable monger, or cavorting with naughty girls, Lang's Gestapo agents are animated and interesting. The Czechs, on the other hand, are all played by American actors and all, even Brennan, give stiff, dull, and wooden performances. Donlevy especially gives some of the flattest line readings of his career.

It's tempting to blame the actors, but in Lotte Eisner's admiring biography, Fritz Lang, she quotes an old interview in which Lang discussed the movie. "We didn't want," Lang said, "analyses of characters, we simply schematized into those who resist and those who organize, those who aspire to freedom but have not yet found or chosen the means of action, and finally the collaborators, the genuine enemy of the people....

"I don't think it is possible in such a plot to go far into the psychological development because the psychology does not change." In other words Lang got the performances he wanted, without any emotional window dressing. Well, he's a genius, I'm not, but Lordy it would have been nice if his heroes had had a little more panache, a little more brio.

I had a few problems with this film. The plot pivots on a shaky point or two - the unsmeared lipstick clue, two unarmed men bearing down on a man with a gun without being shot - that seem a little manufactured and more than a little implausible. Still, HANGMEN ALSO DIE was stylish and an interesting take on a little talked about, at least in America, incident in World War II.

HANGMEN ALSO DIE,is a film directed by Fritz Lang released in 1943 I have given this wonderful movie a five star rating for more than one reason and here they are:

This movie was timely and served to keep anti-nazi morale up
at a time when there was was much uncertainty about the outcome of the European war.
What now seems like an inevitable victory for the Allies was anything but inevitable appearing back them.

The marvelous directing of HANGMEN ALSO DIE by the great Fritz Lang.
Not only does Mr. Lang use his skills in a enthusiastic and forceful manner, especially when dealing with the Nazis, he knows when to be restrained and use a touch of light humor to make the unbearable seem almost, at times tolorable.

This film is based on historical events, yes, "the hangman" really was assassinated, and the exciting story still has time for romance and various
vignettes illustrating how life was for the people under the Nazi yoke.....not to mention how fatal it could be for even the most innoffensive citizens.

HANGMEN ALSO DIE illustrates how when a dictatorship reigns, it's the rats and the informers who prosper. And very often, as is the final case in this movie, the information is maliciously and fatally false.

Losing your personal freedom is akin to death in many ways. The only difference is you may still have a chance to regain your freedom, death, of course, is the ultimate finality.

Rarely have I seen so many fine performances by a wonderful cast of people who are usually supporting actors. Walter Brennan, the marvelous Anna Lee and so many others. Especially the actors cast as Nazi officers,
many if not most I think it would be fair to assume were anti-Nazi refugees
and ironicaly are hired to portray those that they loathed. And they do a crackerjack job of it,too.

It is I think the best underground resistance WWII film that I have seen, even better than THIS LAND IS MINE, directed by Jean Renior, which was released the same year as HANGMEN ALSO DIE.

I urge anyone who has even the slightest interest in the European war to watch this excellent movie, it brings to the screen realistic portrayals of life under the Nazi heel. HANGMEN ALSO DIE is not a documentary but it is a fictional story woven on the loom of historical fact and even to this day an inspiring film.

HANGMEN ALSO DIE is probably most infamous as the film for which Bertolt Brecht did *not* receive screenplay credit. In a more than usually petty bout of Hollywood parochialism, the credit was given to his American collaborator (who shall remain nameless here), despite the testimony of director Fritz Lang that Brecht was responsible for every important aspect of the script. Imagine Elizabeth I's chamberlain saying, "Who is this Shakespeare guy, anyway? Let's say Court Favorite wrote it. He can use the credit." and you'll get a sense of the idiocy of this decision. (Lotte Eisner's FRITZ LANG describes these events with effective concision.)

It is not to deny the tremendous contributions of Lang, cinematographer James Wong Howe and a troupe of first rate character actors to suggest that everything that distinguishes HANGMEN results from Brecht's participation. In lesser hands, the events surrounding the assassination of Heydrich might make an entertaining political melodrama. The formula of stalwart, virtuous victims triumphing over a brutal tyranny rarely fails, particularly with American audiences, eager to re-affirm the democratic mythos repeatedly and uncritically.

Such a film might make more effective propaganda, something like Warner Bros.'s CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY. As such, it wouldn't warrant much more than a footnote in Hollywood history. Brecht's contribution comes from his unequaled sense of the contradictions and ironies of history and power. A victim of persecution from both the Nazis and the House Un-American Activities Committee, he had the political sophistication not to make the Germans and their collaborators in this film larger-than-life Evils, but obviously human creatures with more than a shade of appeal.

The Czechs, on the other hand, are not so much virtuous as wooden and bloodless. Their numerous, long speeches about freedom and humanity are unconvincing and platitudinous. There is, in true Brechtian fashion, no effort to make us "identify" with them, to give us goose bumps of sympathy with the high ideals. Quite the contrary, the film unflinchingly faces the partisans' complicity in the bloody events resulting from the assassination. Events unwind with clockwork precision, deadlier and darker with each step as *both* sides demand ever greater sacrifice from ordinary people.

Precisely because it does not shy away from the complexities of the situation, HANGMEN makes a much stronger statement in favor of political responsibility than a simple melodrama could. For the Germans can be somewhat sympathetic and the Czechs unappealing, and the latter can *still* be seen as ultimately right. Such a level of sophistication is rare in film of any kind. That it comes from Hollywood must be attributed to the presence of an unusually gifted set of émigré talent worthy of the theme. If HANGMEN ALSO DIE is not for everyone, it is definitely for anyone who responds to those rare instancs when a film treats us as intelligent adults.