Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
A Film by Fritz Lang
DVD5 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 02:14:03 | 4,32 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Thriller, War | Nominated for 2 Oscars | USA
A Film by Fritz Lang
DVD5 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 4:3 (720x480) | 02:14:03 | 4,32 Gb
Audio: English AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Thriller, War | Nominated for 2 Oscars | USA
Set in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation, Hangmen Also Die depicts an Eastern Europe populated by spies, traitors and revolutionaries…a deadly funhouse of political intrigue in which every personal encounter brings with it the threat of betrayal.
Pursued by the Germans after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Dr. Svobonda (Brian Donlevy) enlists the aid of a young woman (Anna Lee) who is oblivious to the lethal crosscurrents that surround her. As she learns more about the mysterious doctor, she grows aware of the involvement of her father (Walter Brennan) and fiance (Dennis O'Keefe) in the resistance, and soon finds herself entangled in the revolution's secret operations.
Much of the nightmarish quality of Hangmen Also Die is attributable to playwright Bertolt Brecht, who co-scripted the film with Lang, and legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe, who cloaks every corner in shadow and endows the film with an almost tangible sense of claustrophobia. Hangmen has been digitally mastered from a 35mm print newly-struck from the original (but slightly damaged) nitrate negative.
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Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Hangmen Also Die! comes at us 47 years later, from a number of exciting angles that need explaining. It is the quintessential anti-Nazi WW2 resistance drama, unhindered by studio reticence and fired with the intellectual rage of Germany's most outspoken exiles. The Nazis here are easily the most visually loathsome ever depicted. Heydrich is played (by an actor from the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as a creepy effeminate degenerate, and another SS officer is shown picking a horribly graphic blemish on his face that implies syphilis. Some of this is exaggeration (Heydrich, especially) but Lang is playing in deadly earnest. Everyone who falls into the hands of the Gestapo is doomed and the prospect of torture shows in their faces – old women, tired workmen, a feisty cabdriver played by Lionel Stander.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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Put together to capitalize on the assassination of the real Heydrich in 1942, Hangmen Also Die! is totally apocryphal propaganda. The real killers, Czech exiles sent from London, were quickly captured and presumably paid dearly for their patriotism. But the bloodbath that followed in Prague was real. The wartime frenzy to smear the German foe with whatever tar brush was handy allows Lang to get away with content usually censored from U.S. films – the homosexual slurs, the reference to venereal disease, and the compromising situation Mascha is forced into when the leering Germans catch her and Swoboda in their 'love nest.'
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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According to Lang and Lotte Eisner, famed writer Bertolt Brecht actually wrote the script but was cheated out of onscreen acknowledgement. The story of how writer John Wexley secured the sole screenplay credit is in her book Fritz Lang, along with full documentation of a dispute between Brecht and Lang over the film. Brecht creates a broad gallery of interesting, un-stereotyped characters that experience a communal arousal to political awareness. A number of his touches are worthy of The Threepenny Opera. Swoboda, Savant is informed, means 'freedom' in Czech. A grimly congenial Nazi interrogator torments an old grocer woman with a broken chair that he insists she repair. Just seeing the arthritic grandmother painfully reaching to the floor while he sips his wine transcends the standard torture scene. As is usual with Brecht, the story stops every so often for the Professor and others to deliver position speeches. The calls to action are so compelling that one wants to turn the TV off and go fight for Freedom, like, right now.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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Lang applies the same techniques he uses in his totalitarian spy thrillers, the Mabuse films, Spione, and Ministry of Fear: A fast pace, cross-cut dialogue, and complicated subplots. He gives himself few showoff moments but instead concentrates on getting powerful performances in this overlapping, violent (for a film with almost no onscreen violence) chain of events. Brian Donlevy's conscience-stricken doctor is a very modern conception, mature and never asking for sympathy. The always-wonderful Anna Lee (How Green Was My Valley, Bedlam, Seven Women) is no prissy dame but a conflicted heroine who shows a full range of reactions. One moment she's pelted by a crowd for wanting to report to the Nazis, and the next she's willing to break her lover's heart in a desperate charade that makes her out as a slut in the eyes of all. Walter Brennan turns in a perfect understated performance that, unlike many another wartime martyr role (Charles Laughton in This Land is Mine), doesn't beg for Oscar recognition.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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Best of all is Gene Lockhart, a familiar, efficient but unheralded character actor. His Quisling role here beautifully sustains surprise and shock through Hangmen Also Die's complicated resolution. Lang (and Brecht?) populate the rest of the cast with European refugee actors and Hollywood stock players. All must have shared a commitment that is rarely mentioned in reviews, then or now: pampered movie actors they may have been, but if the war had gone the other way (still a real possibility in 1943) participation in a film like Hangmen Also Die! would have earned them all tickets to a Nazi meat hook. Compare this with whiney Robert Young, who (reportedly) complained about war-themed work over at MGM because there might be trouble for him if Hitler's armies reached Hollywood.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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The ending is a bit abrupt. A coda with the snookered SS occupiers covering their mistakes comes far too quickly, and the film ends without showing what happens to most of its characters. Kino lists its DVD running time as 134 minutes, but Hangmen Also Die! should be a little longer. If you don't mind spoilers, you can read about the missing material in Savant's Jump Cut 7: Hangmen Also Die! article. United Artists issued the movie in 1943 but it has long since changed hands; the absent scenes may have been jettisoned soon after release, and for obvious reasons.
Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
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