Cohen Media Group has detailed the Blu-ray release of director Fritz Lang's
Hangmen Also Die, starring Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee and Gene Lockhart. Recently restored in 2K, the film makes its North American Blu-ray debut on September 9th.
Director Fritz Lang made his reputation in Germany with such landmarks as
Metropolis,
M and
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, but he left the country in 1933 as Nazism took hold. He continued his long and successful career in Hollywood, often returning to the themes of oppression and persecution, never more overtly than in his 1943 thriller
Hangmen Also Die, made midway through World War II.
Working with famous playwright Bertolt Brecht and Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, Lang devised the fact-based thriller to shock and stir audiences. The story opens in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Surgeon Franticek Svoboda (Brian Donlevy, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), a Czech patriot, succeeds in assassinating the (real-life) "Hangman of Europe," the high-ranking Nazi and key Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski). But Svoboda's getaway car is discovered and therefore his planned safe house must reject him. When a woman he doesn't know, Mascha (Anna Lee, future General Hospital matriarch Lila Quartermaine), deliberately misdirects German soldiers close to finding him, he seeks her home as a refuge.
This turns out to be the home of her father, history professor Stephen Novotny (Walter Brennan, Pride of the Yankees, The Real McCoys), who the Nazis have banned from teaching. With the assassin remaining elusive, the Gestapo in Prague offer an incentive for him to turn himself in (or for others to reveal him): They will execute 400 citizens, including Professor Novotny, 40 at a time, until the killer is in custody.
British film critic and historian Geoff Andrew, writing in the definitive "Time Out Film Guide," calls
Hangmen Also Die "marvelous anti-Nazi propaganda structured as a noir thriller." He continues, noting "superb performances throughout, while James Wong Howe's photography perfectly captures the spirit of the occupied city, where hiding places are few and far from safe." The reviewer for The New York Times in 1943 said the film "reveals Mr. Lang as a master of concentrated suspense," while Variety hailed it as "a triumph for Lang!" Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan cites
Hangmen Also Die as being "among his most celebrated, most scrutinized films."
The Cohen Film Collection presents this classic in a restoration made in collaboration with the British Film Institute and Pinewood Studios. Of note: the newly restored edition features a one-minute sequence that was cut from the original domestic release.
Hangmen Also Die is presented in 1080p with LPCM 2.0 audio. Special features include:
- Audio Commentary by Former New York Film Festival Program Director Richard Peņa
- Featurette with Historian Robert Gerwarth
- Illustrated Essay by Prof. Peter Ellenbruch
- 1942 German Newsreel
- Restoration Comparison
- Re-release Trailer