Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Quite a few Nazi exiles were involved with Hangman Also Die, a project that even if hardly true is many cuts above the typical wartime propaganda flick. Director Fritz Lang, writer Berthold Brecht and many in the cast knew the Nazi mentality well and what it was like to live under them. They had the intelligence and foresight to leave while the getting out was good.We in America knew about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, but scarce few details before the war was over. Lang and Brecht created an apocryphal tale of what should have happened. Hangman Also Die is one intricately plotted affair, a lot more than you would see it in a film of this type in wartime America.Hans Heinrich Von Twardowski is on ever so briefly as Heydrich in the beginning. His performance reminded me of Christopher Plummer as Commodus in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. Heydrich was far from the colorful character he's portrayed here in real life. This was a man who could go home to the wife and kids, home and hearth after a day's gassing at Auschwitz. Still Twardowski is memorable if not true to life.We never see the actual shooting. We do see Brian Donlevy who is a doctor as well as an assassin fleeing the scene of the attack and Anna Lee misdirecting the pursuing Nazis just by patriotic instinct. The Nazi response is swift and brutal. They start shooting chosen hostages one of them being Anna Lee's father university professor Walter Brennan.I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at Brennan here who gave a well thought out and restrained performance. In the North Star I thought he was out of place as a Russian peasant. I was expecting the same, but it was nice not to have expectations lived up to.The whole film is about a collective crisis of conscience for the Czech people. What do we do about this assassin, do we hide him, support him, or do we turn him in hopes that hostage shooting will cease? In the meantime the Gestapo presses on with the investigation.Gene Lockhart is also in the cast as a collaborator. His exposure as one is one of the best scenes in the film. Lockhart played many roles like this in his film career, but he was absolutely at his best in a part he honed to perfection.It should have happened this way in real life. The way the Gestapo closes the books on the Heydrich case is really well done. All I can say is that Brecht and Lang play on the characteristics of the Nazis, most of all their paranoia. Intricately plotted and executed beautifully by Fritz Lang and his cast.

The names Fritz Lang and Bert Brecht (yes, he's called Bert, not Bertold, in the on screen credits) can go a long way to giving credit in a movie, but I think reviewers here are over-praising this film. First, I'd criticize the script as being overplotted, with too many tangles and endless complications, like a Baroque church with too many ornaments. Some of the dialogue has to be criticized, too. I know it was written during the war and served as a propaganda tool, but here we judge films as entertainment, maybe even art. At several points the movie stalls while a character speechifies, sounding oh-so-noble but at the same time oh-so-unnatural. People may act nobly in real life, but they seldom accompany their actions with little speeches aimed at some distant audience, beautiful cooked-up phrases for the ages. It's jarring, understandable perhaps because of the war, but it adds a false note to the realism of the film. Second, at one moment I was quite shocked at the directing. Fairly early in the story Natasha angrily accuses the assassin of cowardice for hiding while the hostages rounded up by the Nazis are paying the price with their lives. The way she leans forward over his desk, extending her arm to full length from the shoulder and jabbing it at him, not once but twice, looks completely unnatural. That's not the way a real person points an accusatory finger. It's obvious that the actress has had bad direction to move and pose in such a false manner.Yes, this film is interesting to some extent, perhaps as a period piece. The plot complications, while over-done, at least create the air of something adult and intelligent. The outdoor scenes are all done on a stage set, so it doesn't have the benefit of complete authenticity.I enjoyed seeing Walter Brennan playing an elderly professor with some brains, having had quite enough of his typecasting as a lovable but cantankerous old codger with that high-pitched, whiny voice of his.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943) *** (out of 4) Based on the true story of the assassination of Nazi Reinard Heydrich, known to many as the "Hangman." Lang's story focuses on the aftermath of the events and the terror that the Nazi party much on the Czech people while trying to find the real assassin (Brian Donlevy). Lang's film was released the same year as the similar themed HITLER'S MADMAN but there's no question that this is the better of the two, although I still walked away somewhat disappointed. For the most part this film is a success but there's no denying that it has some major problems in its story as well as a few actors who are really miscast. The biggest problem in the cast is Walter Brennan who never seems very comfortable in his role as a Professor who finds himself being held by the Nazi party because they believe he knows the identity of the assassin. Donlevy makes for a solid lead, although at times one thinks he's way too stiff for the part. I think the sternness actually works in his favor but there are times where you'll wish he'd loosen up just a bit. I also wasn't too impressed with Anna Lee as I felt she underplayed several scenes here including a really bad one early on when she tries to tell her father that she thinks she knows who the assassin is. Gene Lockhart, on the other hands, steals the film in each scene that he's in. He certainly plays the type of villain that people will want to hiss out and he's perfect in each scene. This is especially true towards the end when he becomes the main suspect after years of helping the Nazi party. Horror fans will want to spot Dwight Frye in one brief scene. What makes the film worth sitting through is the actual story itself. The assassination and the following events are a fascinating case and for the most part Lang shows this quite well. His direction is top-notch from the very beginning and I thought he did a remarkable job as the tension starts to build on all the characters involved. The final twenty-minutes feature some very tense moments and they're also quite claustrophobic as the noose starts to get more and more tight. Another major plus is that the film never slows down as the longer running time actually goes by pretty fast without feeling overlong. I think some of the stuff could have been cut out including the entire bit with Lee and her relationship with her fiancé (Dennis O'Keefe) who thinks she's having an affair. I would have liked this to have been cut out with perhaps more attention spent to the actual assassination. With that said, even though one would wish for a masterpiece, we at least get an entertaining film that manages to keep us in suspense as everything begins to come out. This is certainly far from a great movie but there's enough here to make it worth viewing.

After Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by the Czech resistance, the Gestapo goes all out to find his killer. Brian Donlevy gets top billing as the main star and Heydrich's killer, but the actors who portray the Gestapo officers, the Nazi matrons, and especially the one who portrays Heydrich, whom we see only in the opening scene of the movie, really give the film a sense of realism, not that Donlevy is wasted. The first scene with him in it is great, with James Wong Howe's camera right on his face as he's trying to find a room after the killing. This is as much a film about the Gestapo as it is about the resistance, thanks (perhaps) to Fritz Lang, who abandoned Germany after Hitler took power. In fact, Fritz Lang succeeds in bringing out the nuances of the resistance through Donlevy's part, the idea that one man (the killer) could (or should) surrender to the Gestapo in order to save hundreds of others from execution. And these are not faceless characters, but an actual family led by a professor played by Walter Brennan, with his daughter, the increasingly seductive Anna Lee, learning to see how this resistance works. The movie is spread a little thin at times, but develops a highly engrossing subplot involving Gene Lockhart as a wealthy Czech and Gestapo informer and his crumbling relationship with the Germans.