CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

GazerRise Fantastic!

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

bkoganbing 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.

Xjayhawker Here and there you see faces that popped up throughout the forties. Brian Donlevy and Walter Brennan. I see most people consider this Fritz Lang film of 1943 to be quite good. I truly wish I could concur. The Germans don't act like Germans in the office behind a desk. The film is two things..world war II propaganda and massive over dramatization.. It is a lot of over acting..only ever able Walter Brennan does somewhat of a decent job, but I am quite sure he knew this would not be anything but rousing the spirit of all oppressed under the boot heel of Adolph Hitler..No acting nominations came of this and the dialog doesn't come off as authentic..I wish I could urge you to see this, but I cannot. There are many old forgettable films..alas, this is one.Sorry! Good actors..not good acting.

gavin6942 During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, surgeon Dr. Franticek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy), a Czech patriot, assassinates the brutal "Hangman of Europe", Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), and is wounded in the process. In his attempt to escape, he is helped by history professor Stephen Novotny (Walter Brennan), who is himself under suspicion by the Nazis, and his daughter Mascha (Anna Lee).I am sad that Dwight Frye has such a small (uncredited) role, and I am sad that this film was banned by the McCarthy era politicians. That just shows how crazy they were. Why would they ban a film that stands up against Hitler and contains an awesome punch through a window? The film portrays Nazis in the stereotype that we expect of them today. Yet, this was still 1943... so this film deserves credit for influencing how we view the Nazi regime, and also for being based on a true story in the middle of a war rather than after the fact. (Had the outcome of the war gone differently, this film would have been quite the problem.)

classicsoncall When I was a kid I watched a documentary program with my father about Reinhardt Heydrich. I can't remember the name of the show now, but it was one of the top series of the time, each week taking an event from history and examining it in depth. The horror of Heydrich's brutality has remained with me for close to fifty years now, and I've never forgotten his name, even though when I first watched that show I had never heard of him.Which is why it would have been more compelling to tell the true story in "Hangmen Also Die". But if you go in without knowing the historical account, the film serves well as a fictional work that still manages to portray the Nazis as a brutal regime bent on crushing any and all resistance. The tenacity of the Czech underground is also conveyed via the solidarity of it's members to remain true to the ideals of freedom and liberty. Particularly moving was the speech Professor Novotny (Walter Brennan) asked his daughter Nasha (Anna Lee) to memorize to pass on to her younger brother.The story keeps one's interest with some rather amazing twists and turns, chief among them Nasha's initial attempt to tell what she knows (or thinks she knows) at Gestapo headquarters. Once Nasha realizes that a larger issue is at stake than the fate of her own family, she becomes a willing fighter for the cause. The second half of the story takes on a Mission Impossible type of subterfuge designed to pin the assassination of Heydrich on an unwitting traitor and Gestapo informer (Gene Lockhart as Emil Czaka). It's not revealed how the underground managed to put the plan together, but all the right witnesses came forward as necessary to implicate Czaka as he slowly unravels.I think it's important to keep the memory of brutal regimes like Hitler's Nazis alive as a warning to future generations. Here it's presented on a number of levels with the random executions of hundreds of innocent victims to the entirely thuggish individual beating of the old florist lady. Even in the face of such overwhelming persecution, it's encouraging to be reminded that those who believe in freedom and liberty will always find a way to triumph.