|
|
List Price: $29.95 Amazon.com's Price: $26.99 You Save: $2.96 (10%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: DVD DVD Layers: 1 DVD Sides: 1 EAN: 9786305683933 Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, NTSC ISBN: 630568393X Label: Kino Video Languages: Manufacturer: Kino Video MPN: 143 Number Of Items: 1 Picture Format: Academy Ratio Publisher: Kino Video Release Date: January 18, 2000 Running Time: 134 minutes Studio: Kino Video Theatrical Release Date: April 15, 1943 Editorial Review: Amazon.com: Because it's been little seen, and because people tend to shrug off contemporaneous World War II films as "propaganda," Hangmen Also Die has never received its due. It's a brilliant, riveting movie, made in response to the atrocities committed against the Czech people following the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich, Hitler's personal "hangman." Under Fritz Lang's ferociously stylized direction, the duel of wits between the Nazi occupiers and the Prague underground--"a ghost army sworn to haunt them till their blood runs cold"--becomes the stuff of legend: virtually another installment of Die Nibelungen, and a dynamic variation on the urban phantasmagoria of the Mabuse films and Spione and M. There is propaganda--but when the blood-curdling rhetoric comes from Bertolt Brecht, no less, in his only movie script for an American producer, who's to complain? Lang was Brecht's full collaborator, however, and the narrative is a steel trap closing on everyone. Every act of charity may potentially doom an entire family, and the resistance fighters--especially Brian Donlevy's doctor-assassin--agonize over their culpability in jeopardizing hundreds of innocents taken hostage in reprisal for Heydrich's shooting. The moral-ethical duality extends to the casting, and our response to it. Apart from Walter Brennan, astonishingly "Brechtian" as a Czech professor of history, the "good guys" are ho-hum Central Casting types while the Nazis--evil incarnate--are juicily portrayed by a passel of German-Jewish émigrés (Alexander Granach, Reinhold Schünzel, Ludwig Donath, et al.), all savoring the opportunity to skewer their own oppressors and to act up a German Expressionist storm in their Hollywood exile. Superbly photographed by James Wong Howe. --Richard T. Jameson Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Hangmen Also DieOne of the finest anti-Nazi thrillers to emerge from the WWII period, Lang's noirish approach to the propaganda film involves cloak-and-dagger intrigue, sinister interrogations, and plenty of light-and-shadow atmospherics, courtesy of camera great James Wong Howe. Such elements were second nature to German ex-pat Lang, director of "M" and "The Big Heat," and his impeccable direction of numerous character actors--a cab driver (Lionel Stander) and a fruit merchant (Sarah Padden), in particular--adds ... Read More Rating: - Hangmen Also Die: The Lesson is Evil ExistsWhen Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czech patriots in 1942, the immediate result was the liquidation of the entire village of Lidice. Every citizen was murdered and the town itself reduced to rubble. The enormity of this crime was not made apparent at the time, but in HANGMEN ALSO DIE, director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Bertold Brecht created a film that dramatises the essential events in a manner that suffers from some deliberately heavy acting but in no way subtracts from ... Read More Rating:  - A tribute to the oppressed who dared to fight Nazi brutality...'Hangmen Also Die' takes as its story, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a German Nazi official, head of the security police, chief deputy to the head of the Schutzstaffel, Heinrich Himmler, who organized mass exterminations of European Jews during the opening years of World War II... and also the subsequent retaliatory devastation of Lidice, a Czech mining village... With his usual skill, Lang weaves a tale of gripping suspense: the Gestapo's efforts to find the assassin; the workings ... Read More Rating:  - Bert and Fritz together at last!This is a relatively straightforward propaganda melodrama, with nothing particularly compelling to recommend it, but for one notable exception. Bertold Brecht's villains and miscreants are all so full of gusto. They share kinship with the ones in Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny after all. It seems Brecht could not create a scoundrel he couldn't admire on a certain, mischievous level. The ones in this film are no exception, and lift it out of the "ordinary" into the realm of the "oddity". Rating: - why the end titles are ironic, etc.Classic Expressionist images and sly situations by Fritz Lang; cinematography by James Wong Howe; propaganda poetry by Bertolt Brecht (so nice they recite it twice in succession, in case we've missed the point)--HANGMEN ALSO DIE is irresistable! The story was inspired by the actual assassination of Reinhard Heydrick, who had earlier appeared as himself in Riefenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. It's interesting to note that Heydrick continued to have a successful film career for another fifty years, ... Read More |
