"Hangmen Also Die" (1943) is the only Hollywood screen credit of Bertholt Brecht (whose plays and stories have been the basis of many movies, the most notable of which is G. W. Pabst's film of "Threepenny Opera."). According to film historian Lotte Eisner and the film's director, Fritz Lang, the screenplay was Brecht's, though the credit was for the screenplay went to the American screenwriter (and WGA member) John Wexley.

The DVD is marketed as "cinema noire." Fritz Lang did much to invent the film language of claustrophobic menace and dark shadows that is fundamental to cinema noire in the "Doktor Mabuse" films and "M," and he made some of the essential Hollywood noir films of the late 1940s early 1950s (The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Big Heat, Human Desire), but the worldview of "Hangmen Also Die" is not the hopeless, paranoid one of cinema noir. (In that sense, Lang's first Hollywood film, Fury (1936), about a lynching is more of a noir, and You Only Live Once (1937) is a great noir title and appropriately despairing.)

Rather than being a noire, "Hangmen Also Die" is World War II propaganda defending terrorism within occupied Europe. Like Jean Renoir's "This Land Is Mine," the year before, "Hangmen Also Die" centers on shielding a man who has gunned down a Nazi occupier. The movie takes an unequivocal position that the occupied population should not be cowed by reprisals and should shield assassins no matter what the cost in torture and execution of hostages. Both movies have big speeches— by Charles Laughton in Renoir's film, Walter Brennan in Lang's — about the future justifying the sacrifice of the speakers' lives. Actually, each has a bipartite speech. In Renoir's film, there is one woman who wants to reveal the identity of the assassin to save her son, but there is total solidarity across Prague in Lang's.

"Hangmen Also Die" is based on the 1942 assassination of the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia, SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, called "The Hangmen" by Czechs because of his brutality, and one of the main architects of "the final solution." The movie has little to do with what happened except for the target of the assassination, that it took a few days for him to die, and that there was a massive hunt for the assassin and many reprisals by the occupiers.

The movie assassin is a physician named Svoboda (the Czech word for "freedom") who is part of a Prague resistance cell that has mostly been involved in slowing down and sabotaging factory production. He is betrayed by no one and Hollywood-style poetic justice is rendered on a collaborationist. In reality, there was a pair of Czech commandos (Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis,) flown in by the British. They were betrayed by a Czech and died in a gun battle in Karel Boromejsky Church in Prague on June 18, 1942.

And, rather than the daily execution of hostages until the assassin was captured, the Nazis chose a Czech town (with no connection to the assassination), shot all the adult males and placed its women in children in concentration camps. I wonder if this was too much reality for 1943 audiences to stand, or whether it was judged likely to undercut the moral certainties of validation assassination and helping assassins escape.

There was no love triangle involved in the real case (unlike in "This Land Is Mine"). As the fiancee; Dennis O'Keefe mostly looks perplexed. Anna Lee (who appeared in many John Ford movies, most notably in "How Green Was My Valley") has much more to do, both emotionally and as the linchpin of the plot.

As Dr. Svoboda, Brian Donleavy is slick. (He was a smooth operator in every role in which I can remember him.) It's hard to believe him as the physician/assassin, and harder still to believe him as the man for whom the Gestapo is turning the country inside out to find. He's blase about the suffering of his compatriates and his own danger. (In outwitting the Gestapo, Fred MacMurray in Above Suspicion does a much more credible job of showing worry; for that matter, so does Jack Benny in "To Be or Not To Be." And Kent Smith eventually looks desperate in "This Land Is Mine.")

The Gestapo bloodhound, Inspector Gruber and the beer company profiteer, Mr. Czacka, are played compellingly by, respectively, Alexander Granach (Marat in "Danton") and Gene Lockhart (Regis in "Algiers"). They are not stock villains: Gruber is intrigued by the challenge of crime detection and Czacka is weak and greedy more than evil. However, I have to mention the inclusion of the communist stereotype of Nazi effeteness that is dragged out for the opening scene of Heydrich, which Brecht later said that this was the only scene shot as he wrote it.

The cinematography — by the young James Wong Howe — is mostly not showy, though there's some artful shadow work. The chase scene after the assassination is not very dramatic.

I was surprised to learn that the nondescript musical score by Hanns Eisler (who had worked with Brecht in Germany and who also scored Lang's "Woman on the Beach" before being deported following a House Un-American Activities Committee appearance) was nominated for an Academy Award. Then I saw that no less than sixteen scores were nominated for 1943 (Alfred Newman's for "The Song of Bernadette" won) Oscars.

It takes way too long for "Hangmen Also Dies" to get interesting. The chase immediately after the assassination is remarkably undramatic, comparing unfavorably to those in "Above Suspicion" and "This Land Is Mine" and very unfavorably in comparison to "M" and You Only Live Once. The DVD version is missing six minutes from the original, and much more truncated versions appear on television, and it's easy to see the temptation to snip and try to tighten the exposition.

Tension eventually develops and the last half hour has some of the wicked wit I associate with Brecht. Seeing "Hangmen Also Die" 60 years after it was made, one knows that the Nazis' rule of the Czechs was not going to last many years, but one also knows that the freedom looked forward to was going to be long in arriving (and that Brecht and Eisler were deeply complicit with the Stalinist tyranny that succeeded the Nazi tyranny). And resistance that is always labeled "terrorism" by occupying forces is far from being a dead issue in the present day.



Recommended:
Yes

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