FRITZ LANG’s “Hangmen Also Die,” which is as badly named as most movies, is a grim, awkward film having to do with the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichs-protector of Czecho-Slovakia, and the failure of the Nazis either to capture the murderer or to break the spirit of the Czech people. The movie fails to do for Czecho-Slovakia what other occupation films have failed to do for Holland, France or Norway (twice), and that is, capture the spirit of the Czechs. Like all the others, it didn’t even try. It is a Hitchcock man-trying-to-get-away-from-the-police plot, but unlike Hitchcock, it has no suavity, suspense or fluidity. Most of its success comes from the complete hate with which it goes after its Nazis, drawing each portrait in thick black line. Heydrich the Hangman flounces around with his wooden hatchet face lipsticked clumsily enough to make sure you get the idea, the other Nazis squeeze pimples, crack their knuckles and slobber over fat sausages or fat prostitutes.
The style used here is the healthy one of the silent movie days, when you had to prove visually the evilness of the villain. So the savagery is more grueling than in other propaganda films: victims are smothered under coal piles, killed in groups, kicked to death. By far its most successful scene is the one in which the heroine is set upon by a mob of Czechs, who have been told she is an informer. Here, if nowhere else, the fierce, unalterable nature of mass resistance to the Nazis is allowed to develop within the scene, and the emotion of the crowd played against the terror of the girl works up to something real.
The plot’s windings are endless and sometimes fantastic. Much of the playing is beginner’s stuff. The lighting is awful. The dialogue contains such clumsy “German” as “Stay right where you are or you get a slug in the guts,” and such weird “Czech” as “Don’t let yourself get snowed under at Valley Forge.” Nowhere are human beings examined deeply enough to find the ideologies this movie is presumably about. The whole thing is as stagey as its murder of the Quisling, who manages to fall near enough to a cathedral to try to drag himself up the steps and inside while the organ plays. Also, it does seem as if not every scene need be made a device of propaganda, or if it has to be, the dialogue should be at least pronounceable and the players rehearsed in how not to sound like radio announcers.
Near the end a subplot gets going, which draws all of Prague into a plan to convict a rich Quisling beermaker—Gene Lockhart—for the Heydrich affair. The way they all gang up on Mr. Lockhart, who sobs convulsively as usual, is both funny and ingenious, and the thing in general unwinds with more vitality than the main bout. This, with the Nazi portraits and that scene between the girl and the crowd, get it in for my vote as good, in spite of all the ineptitude—but it’s close.
Another occupation film out now is Warner Brothers’ “Edge of Darkness,” in which everything is twice as bad.
May 3, 1943