Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Hangmen Also Die Blu-ray Movie Review

Resistance is difficult, not futile.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 16, 2014

There’s a thrilling moment in the timeless classic Casablanca when refugee Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) leads a bunch of defiant club goers in a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. It’s a moment of supposedly “innocent” but unmistakably visceral resistance in the face of Nazi evil. There’s much the same sentiment running rampant through Fritz Lang’s 1943 thriller Hangmen Also Die, a film that was in today’s parlance “ripped from the headlines”, in this case the then recent assassination of SS major domo Reinhard Heydrich. Hangmen Also Die, while featuring a screenplay credited to John Wexley, actually began life as a story collaboration between Lang and fellow exiled German Bertolt Brecht (Americanized somewhat hilariously in this film’s credits as Bert Brecht). Not known for ever shading their progressive political tendencies, Lang and Brecht aren’t especially subtle with their thesis in Hangmen Also Die, but the film has a stalwart resoluteness that makes it a quite stirring manifesto in support of a free people’s attempt to thwart outside domination. The Nazis here may be cartoons at times (Heydrich is depicted as a lipstick wearing, mincing fool who would be right at home in Springtime for Hitler), but there’s little doubt that Lang especially wanted Americans to wake up to an imminent threat. That’s perhaps one reason why the good guys here—ostensibly Czech citizens—all speak in good, old fashioned American accents, while the nefarious Germans have a tendency to lapse back and forth between their native language and heavily accented English.

A “traditional” Hollywood war film would probably have focused on the logistics of the plot to kill Heydrich, but it’s instructive to note that Lang doesn’t even feature the assassination in any meaningful way, and in fact when a panicked man named Franticek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy) is first seen running through a labyrinth of Prague streets, it’s not exactly clear what’s going on, other than the fact that there are a bunch of Nazi soldiers chasing him. When an innocent bystander named Mascha Novotny (Anna Lee) deliberately misleads the blackshirts as to what direction Svoboda took, that allows the furtive Svoboda to at least temporarily escape. It of course is revealed (albeit rather discursively) that Heydrich has been shot, and the implication is clear that it was Svoboda who did the shooting. A supposed getaway car driven by a man named Banya (Lionel Stander) is forced to move by police, however, thereby stranding Svoboda and leaving him to fend for himself while Nazi troopers storm through the city searching for the culprit.

When Svoboda finds that all planned routes of egress have been blocked, he has no recourse but to figure out who the kind young woman in the town square was, and he soon arrives at Mascha’s door, where the shocked young woman doesn’t know quite how to respond. Again, Lang demurs from stating anything explicitly, but it’s completely clear that Mascha intuitively understands that Svoboda is Heydrich’s assassin and is looking for some kind of asylum. She hesitantly invites him in, where she provides Svoboda with an alias and a false story about how she knows him as she introduces him to her parents, including her father, Stephen Novotny (Walter Brennan), a university professor whose progressive politics have made him persona non grata to the occupying Germans. Again, without so much as a word, Lang hints that Professor Novotny understands exactly who Svoboda is and what the stakes are for bringing the fugitive in from the cold.

That sets the main course of events into motion, as the Nazis start rounding up huge amounts of Czech citizens, holding them hostage (and ultimately killing them in “sets” of 40 or so) until someone cracks and reveals who the killer is. Again, it’s quite remarkable that there really isn’t any overt reference to Svoboda’s culpability, at least not until later, when Mascha tries to get him to confess in order to save her father, who has been taken prisoner by the Nazis. Meanwhile, in one of the film’s most harrowing sequences, the local Nazi commandant has taken an elderly grocer and florist prisoner since she was the last woman seen speaking with the mysterious female (Mascha) who misled the soldiers. With the unlikely prop of a broken chair serving as a symbol of the balance of power between the two, Lang stages an apparently “harmless” scene that is nonetheless rife with menace and danger.

Hangmen Also Die is perhaps slightly hobbled by the wooden performance of Donlevy, who is called upon to be stoic in the face of mounting pressure to turn himself in (in order to save the many hostages who are facing death), but who often seems almost lobotomized here, wandering through scenes without any change of facial expression and with an almost complete lack of inflection in his speaking voice. That shortcoming is at least partially ameliorated by the nice turns by the always lovely Lee (a bit too hysterical here at times) and of course Brennan, who invests the professor with the requisite nobility to be a stand in for the Czech people as a whole. Gene Lockhart is also a standout as a Nazi sympathizer named Czaka, a collaborator who finds out there’s a price to be paid for “sleeping with the enemy.”

This edition of Hangmen Also Die restores the last few minutes of a montage which was strangely deleted in some theatrical prints and many previous home video releases. In the redacted version, the climax (which involves Czaka) cut bizarrely to Heydrich’s successor reading a coded report from headquarters detailing the failure of the Reich to cow the Czech people into giving up the perpetrator of Heydrich’s assassination. This left several salient questions unanswered, including what happened to Professor Novotny, as well as the outcome of a derailed romance between Mascha and her fiancé, Jan (Dennis O’Keefe). The reinstated footage includes both dour and hopeful elements, but restores the obvious intent of Lang and his comrades that resistance is in fact not futile, though it sometimes may seem like it is.

Hangmen Also Die Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hangmen Also Die is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.33:1. The film includes the following explanatory card:

Restored in 2012 by the Restoration Department Pinewood Studios UK utilising the best of the surviving archive film elements that included some original 1943 nitrate.

The most important word in that explanation is probably "included", for it seems apparent that this was probably cobbled together from several different source elements, with some fairly wide variances in everything from contrast and clarity to grain structure and sharpness on display. That said, there have been excellent (some might even say heroic) efforts here to "normalize" things and provide a generally consistent, organic viewing experience. Contrast has been noticeably improved, and if there are still fluctuations, the bulk of the film offers some great, convincing blacks, very important for the ambience that Lang and iconic cinematographer James Wong Howe were going for. Parts of this transfer can still look relatively soft, but the restorative efforts here have minimized overt damage like scratches and dirt. Fine detail is good if not overwhelming in midrange shots, and quite good in close-ups. While some clean up has obviously been done, the good news is that there are no signs of over aggressive sharpening or denoising. Given the state of the elements utilized for this restoration, this is a very commendable effort that will most likely more than please the film's fans.

Hangmen Also Die Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hangmen Also Die's uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mono track has its fair share of pops and cracks, but there's no untoward damage here. Dialogue is always easy to hear, and Hanns Eisler's Oscar nominated score, while just a tad brittle sounding in the upper ranges, rings through very well without a lot of distracting distortion. Fidelity is good but occasionally problematic. All told, this is listenable if not pristine.

Hangmen Also Die Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Story of a Hangman: Robert Gerwath on Reinhard Heydrich (1080p; 28:33) is a really interesting 2014 featurette discussing both the historical Heydrich as well as Lang's film. Gerwath is a professor who wrote a book about Heydrich.


• 1942 German Newsreel (1080p; 7:58). I'd love to be able to tell you what this UFA piece is about, but there are no subtitles. Also, unless my ears are deceiving me, the narrator is not speaking German.


• Restoration Before and After Comparison (1080p; 5:01) contains the following text:

  "Hangmen Also Die" is a historically important film by a very respected director. Still, as with many films from this era, the original film elements have not weathered the test of time very well. Cohen Film Collection, in conjunction with the British Film Institute and Pinewood Studios, endeavored to breathe new life into this forgotten classic, so that a new generation of film enthusiasts could enjoy it anew. These three brief before and after examples illustrate some of the complexities behind restoring this classic film to its former glory.

• 2014 Theatrical Re-Release Trailer (1080p; 1:45)


• Feature Length Audio Commentary by Richard Peña, Director Emeritus of the New York Film Festival, 2014. Peña delivers another extremely informative commentary, dealing with everything from Lang's shooting style to the weirdly redacted scenes from the film's closing moments.

Hangmen Also Die Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Some people consider Hangmen Also Die to be an out and out masterpiece, but I'm afraid I'm not quite in that camp. The film is probably too polemical for its own good, and while Lang is to be commended for dealing with some issues in an almost abstract fashion, when he indulges in more literal minded gambits like one character stumbling toward a church as he's being gunned down by Nazis, things move from unsubtle to almost parodying levels. My biggest hangup is with Donlevy's almost somnambulistic performance, which I suppose is meant to come across as stolid, but instead simply looks stiff and uninspired (and perhaps more importantly, given the character's position, uninspiring). Lang and cinematographer James Wong Howe still make this a fascinating film to watch. While there are some minor issues with video and audio here, the supplements are great and (warts and all) Hangmen Also Die comes Highly recommended.