HANGMEN ALSO DIE
(United Artists)
T is a pity the cinema industry thinks it necessary for nearly every film about the war and about Occupied Europe to have a Message
and point a Moral; or rather, it is a pity they don’t leave the stories to deliver their own Messages and point their own Morals, as they are quite capable of doing, instead of interrupting the action every now and then while the characters make orations about democracy, sing songs about liberty, and apostrophise the soul of Undefeated Czechoslovakia (or Poland, Norway, Holland or France, as the case may be). It is especially a pity in the case of Hangmen Also Die, which is a pretty good thriller when it is allowed to get on with its job of weaving a melodramatic tale round the assassination of Heydrich, the Nazi overlord of Czechoslovakia, and a pretty dull lump of propagandist pudding when it isn’t. Still, this is a show to-see if you are interested in studying the . directorial technique of one of the screen’s Old Masters — the German, Fritz Lang. He
uses the familiar materials of anti-Nazi melodrama: the refined brutality of Gestapo agents; the defiant populace and the slimy Quislings; the ramifications of the Underground Movement; plot, counter-plot, and hair-breadth escape. But Lang creates his best effects of terror and suspense with little details like the bowler hat of the Gestapo chief, which falls to the floor and gradu. ally stops rolling while its owner is being strangled. It is a _ deliberate, almost ponderous, style of narration; rather irksome at times, but on the whole, well suited to this type of story, and especially so at the end. The climax in which the Quisling is saddled with the assassination is far-fetched, but it has a remorselessness which excuses its improbability. " I regret to say that, on the acting side, the Baddies (including Alexander Granach and Gene Lockhart), put it all over the Goodies (Brian Donlevy, Anna Lee and Walter Brennan).
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19440421.2.28.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 252, 21 April 1944, Page 16
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331HANGMEN ALSO DIE New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 252, 21 April 1944, Page 16
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