During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, surgeon Dr. Franticek Svoboda, a Czech patriot, assassinates the brutal "Hangman of Europe", Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, and is wounded in the process. In his attempt to escape, he is helped by history professor Stephen Novotny and his daughter Mascha.
Brian Donlevy Walter Brennan Anna Lee Gene Lockhart Dennis O'Keefe Margaret Wycherly Nana Bryant William Roy Hans Heinrich von Twardowski Alexander Granach Tonio Selwart Jonathan Hale Lionel Stander Sarah Padden Edmund MacDonald Byron Foulger Virginia Farmer Ludwig Donath George Irving James Bush Arno Frey Lester Sharpe Arthur Loft Reinhold Schünzel Chester Conklin Claire McDowell John Abbott Louis Adlon Erville Alderson Show All…
Henker sterben auch, Myöskin pyövelit kuolevat, Pyövelitkin kuolevat, Kai oi dimioi pethainoun, Never Surrender, No Surrender, Trust the People, Les bourreaux meurent aussi, Voor Beulen Geen Genade, Los verdugos también mueren, Anche i boia muoiono, Auch Henker sterben, Skräckdagar i Prag, Палачите също умират, Os Carrascos Também Morrem, Bødler dør også, A hóhér halála, Dzelat takodje umire, Kaci takze umieraja, Палачи тоже умирают, 刽子手之死, جلادان نیز می میرند!, 사형집행인도 죽는다!, 死刑執行人もまた死す
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Bertolt Brecht’s only Hollywood script, “Hangmen Also Die!” has few aspects of the German’s playwright’s radical ‘Lehrstücke,” but manages instead to be a solidly standard, and somewhat subversive, entry in the wartime noir genre.
Directed by Fritz Lang, “Hangmen” uses the real life assassination of a Nazi official in Prague as the basis for its pro-revolutionary plot. Brecht’s narrative (contrary to later historical knowledge) credits the killing to a Communist-linked network of resistance fighters, though their ties to this ideology in the movie are necessarily underplayed for the sake of its Western backers.
“Hangmen,” with stunning cinematography by the legendary James Wong Howe, is most interestingly viewed as a Hollywood interpretation on the same themes as the later French WWII…
what a title! the production secretary that thought it up had a sense of pulp poetry that Quentin Tarantino would kill for.
anyway, it's hard to say with any real authority, but i'd wager that Fritz Lang's galvanizing bit of propaganda hasn't lost much of its bite since it was first released smack dab in the middle of the war. sure, there's a bit of a halo over things, given that we have the history to know that the good guys ultimately pulled this one out, but the sense of gestapo collar-tightening is still quite palpable. the plot might be far too convoluted for its own good, too overeager to pad its message with genre conventions (there's a reason that…
Well it's fair to say that Fritz Lang wasn't a big fan of the Nazi's! Apparently Goebbels tried to recruit Lang to work for his propaganda ministry, but the director turned down the offer, went to Hollywood, and made this instead! Hangman Also Die makes his feelings clear, while also telling an absorbing story in the process. The film is set in 1942 and takes place during the tyrannical Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. We follow the shooting of a Nazi official and subsequent reign of terror as the occupiers try to force the local population into revealing the identity of the assassin. The film is rather long at over two hours and suffers from some plodding plotting. It's function as…
Scripted by Lang, John Wexley, and Bertolt Brecht, this was filmed not long after the actual assassination of Heydrich. It's not exactly historically accurate, but that was not Lang's intention. While this doesn't stand up to the best Lang from Germany or Hollywood, there are definitely some linkages to "M" and the Dr. Mabuse films. This involves the search, by the Nazis, for the man who killed Heydrich, although unlike "M," the sympathy goes to the assassin, both from the viewer, and from the people of Prague. There are also secret societies, but in this case, that secret society is attempting to thwart Nazi production and stir up patriotic resistance against the invaders. Because it was filmed during the war,…
Along in the run of anti-Nazi thrillers that director Fritz Lang was put in charge of in the early 40s, next to the greats Man Hunt, Ministry of Fear and Cloak and Dagger; the arguable most ambitious of the bunch got to be Hangmen Also Die!, a near two and a half hour espionage thriller dipped in Noir artifices of dark alleys and conspiracy based plots surrounded in a intricate line of murders and secrets, holding lives accountable in a fatalist doomed highway of no safe return.
In great Lang fashion, some of his early spy thrillers play around so many elements one could name proper Noir language that’s hard to separate it from other better and more suitable classics…
Fritz Lang skizziert eine intensive Hintergrundgeschichte welcher das Attentat auf Reinhard Heydrich in Prag 1942 zugrunde liegt.
Heydrich wurde mit der Endlösung der Juden beauftragt und herrschte mit schier unmenschlicher Gewalt als Reichsprotektor über die Region Böhmen und Mähren.
Lang und Drehbuchautor Bertolt Brecht nahmen die Fakten zwar auf, konstruierten aber eine eigene Interpretationsgeschichte über die Attentäter und die Ereignisse die nach dem Anschlag von Statten gingen.
Fritz Lang war ein versierter Filmemacher voller Brillanz. Er konnte Spannung aufbauen und Geschichten erzählen - ob mit oder ohne Ton - und erschuf ein Filmvermächtnis das sich immer noch zu entdecken lohnt.
AUCH HENKER STERBEN reiht sich in dieses spannende Werk ein und stellt schlussendlich nichts anderes als ein Plädoyer gegen den…
Fritz Lang makes a detailed wartime movie using the corrupt madness of the Nazis to make a real nice thriller. Wouldn't have minded swapping Brian Donlevy for any other rugged guy, but evil dudes were really well cast. This is basically a chess game between the Nazis and the resistance, which made the intense and sloppy lurking of main Gestapo honcho Alexander Granach the highlight of this. Not Lang at his sharpest, but there was a playfulness in this which made it dark fun.
Fritz Lang takes his deeply complex manhunt of 'M' and transplants it into war-torn Czechoslovakia as a simple act of kindness spirals out of control for a family in Nazi-occupied Prague.
The Nazi commandant of the city (known as 'The Hangman') is shot and as the assassin (future Quatermass Brian Donlevy) tries to make his escape, a young woman steers the chasing soldiers in the opposite direction. The immediate implementation of a curfew and house to house searches means the assassin has nowhere else to go but the house of the woman who has already saved his life and from here, the escape and the subsequent manhunt twist and turn as every avenue available to both sides is explored throughout…
If I am not mistaken, the first time that Fritz Lang made an anti-Nazi film that wasn't compelled to use metaphor and innuendo, and you can feel the passion radiating out of the movie. It is possibly the least controlled Lang film I've seen - certainly it is the most bloated - with its lengthy propagandistic stretches fervently begging us to think of the bravery and sacrifice needed to resist totalitarianism; yet it's so deeply sincere that a little messy bloat is all for the good. The acting is all over the place, though Walter Brennan, at least, gives one of the best performances of his career; otherwise, the bad guys are generally more compelling screen presences than the heroes. Really interesting use of unsubtitled German throughout.
Overall, a remarkable wartime moral parable that remains full of sweaty tension, though I acknowledge that this kind of forthright melodramatic propaganda is by and large not to modern tastes.
Hangmen Also Die! tells the story of assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and, perhaps more specifically, the manhunt that followed. It is a highly fictionalised account, but considering that the Nazi Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague and chief architect of the Holocaust was only murdered a year prior to this movie's release and the details of the assassination were still wrapped up by official secrets, I think we can excuse the Hollywood spin on this occasion.
In turn, part anti-Nazi propaganda and noir thriller, the film is essentially a meeting of minds and styles between prominent refugees from Nazi Germany director Fritz Lang and playwright Bertolt Brecht - not forgetting Hanns Eisler who provides the score. The propaganda is ably handled…
This is a solid thriller that really hits the ground running. Fritz Lang's use of the camera is excellent creating tension and some really creative shots in a film noir style so capturing those elongated shadows. I think my favourite shot is in a darkened theatre you see these darkened heads talking feverishly to one another. The story has a lot to it with plenty of twists and turns. Granted this is very much a gung-ho let's get those evil nazi movie which sometimes I can find that a little tiresome but I like that its from the point of view of the Czech people resisting the occupation of those nogoodniks. It made it more unique that way. I'm glad I finally caught up with this one.
Se Fritz Lang fez quatro filmes que podem ser abrangidos pelo subtítulo “filmes anti-nazis”, em dois deles (Ministry of Fear e Cloak and Dagger) o anti-nazismo é, um pouco, o macguffin de Hitchcock: o essencial dessas obras (essenciais) não está nessa etiqueta. Estará em Man Hunt? A questão não é pacifica, mas não é para ser abordada hoje.
E quanto a Hangmen Also Die? Aqui, o caso é francamente mais complexo, até pela própria génese da obra e do que nela pode ser atribuído a Lang, a Bertolt Brecht ou ao poeta e dramaturgo comunista John Wexley, o único a figurar no genérico como argumentista.
Lang disse que 90% do argumento do filme se devia a Brecht e citou expressamente…
