Film Review: Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Hollywood's penchant for sacrificing historical accuracy in favor of entertainment is a well-documented phenomenon. Sometimes that included even very recent events, when the audience had more opportunity to compare fact with fiction. In case of WW2, this approach was justified by the needs of wartime propaganda, and the prime example can be found in Hangmen Also Die!, 1943 spy thriller directed by Fritz Lang.
Hangmen Also Die! is based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (briefly played in opening scenes by Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), one of the most notorious Nazi leaders and a close associate of Adolf Hitler. Heydrich was appointed as the Reichsprotektor, or governor, of Bohemia-Moravia, a region of former Czechoslovakia that was under Nazi rule but not directly annexed to the Third Reich. Heydrich's cruelty and disdain for the Czech population earned him the nickname "Hangman" and "Butcher of Prague," making him one of the most reviled figures in Nazi-occupied Europe. His reign came to an end on May 27th, 1942, when he was ambushed by Czech resistance operatives in the streets of Prague and succumbed to his injuries a few days later.
The plot of the film, released merely few months after the event, reconstructs the events that unfolded in the days following the assassination. The deed was carried out by Dr. František Svoboda (played by Brian Donleavy), a surgeon whose getaway driver (played by Lionel Stander) is arrested by the Germans. This forces Svoboda to, while avoiding curfew, desperately seek shelter in the home of history professor Stephan Novotny (played by Walter Brennan) and his beautiful daughter, Mascha (played by Anna Lee). This proves to be a dangerous decision, as the Gestapo will stop at nothing to find and punish the perpetrator. To this end, they take hundreds of prominent Czech citizens hostage and execute them until the assassin is arrested or turns himself in. The search is conducted by Gestapo inspector Alois Gruber (played by Alexander Granach), whose prime asset happens to be Emil Csaka (played by Gene Lockhart), a brewing magnate who has infiltrated the top ranks of the resistance as an informant.
Hangmen Also Die! is best known as the only collaboration between two celebrated exiles from Nazi Germany – legendary film director Fritz Lang and famous playwright Bertolt Brecht, who wrote the script. However, their partnership was marred by a dispute over proper authorship, with the script being formally credited to John Wexley. For Brecht, who did work in Hollywood for a while, the story for the film was the only credited work. The script clearly shows left-wing leanings that would later get him in trouble during the McCarthy years. The film celebrates ordinary Czech people, especially those from the working classes and lower strata of society, for their valiant resistance against tyrannical occupation. The main Nazi collaborator, impressively played by veteran character actor Gene Lockhart, happens to be a rich capitalist.
Although some critics and scholars have described Hangmen Also Die! as an early film noir, Fritz Lang was clearly taking the film into more generic thriller territory, taking much inspiration from his 1931 masterpiece, M. Many of the scenes create suspense, and there is a clear attempt to show Prague and its citizens from various strata of society trying to make sense of the assassination and cruel Nazi retribution, in the same manner he has shown Berliners trying to deal with a serial killer twelve years earlier. Lang is much helped by veteran cinematographer James Wong Howe, who seamlessly inserts pre-war stock footage of Prague into scenes made in studio sets, making Hangmen Also Die! look rather authentic for WW2 propaganda standards.
Hangmen Also Die! also benefits from a good supporting cast, especially actors who play Nazis, themselves being exiles from the regime. Many of these characters aren't one-dimensional villains, simple brutes, or buffoons typical of WW2 propaganda. Alexander Granach is very effective as a very intelligent Gestapo detective who proves to be a worthy opponent for the protagonist, and the same can be said of Reinhold Schünzel, grand star of Weimar era cinema, as his boss. Their performances are much more impressive than those of the protagonists, which include veteran character actor Walter Brennan as a saintly patriotic professor and Brian Donleavy as a very bland protagonist. British actress Anna Lee mostly serves as an obligatory pretty face, although her performance is helped by a script that amplifies melodrama and even has her in one scene being rather scandalously undressed for Hays Code-era censorship.
While good by itself and probably satisfying for audiences in Allied countries after its premiere, Hangmen Also Die! did not age well. The needs of propaganda ensured that all characters except Heydrich were fictional, and the "clever" plot twist intended to give a happy ending to the otherwise bleak story is at odds with the historical facts uncovered after the war and used for more accurate cinema reconstructions of the assassination, such as the 1964 Czechoslovakian film Atentát, the 1975 film Operation Daybreak, and the 2016 film Operation Anthropoid.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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