Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Most excellent story-telling and entertainment expertly acted out for over two hours that does all it is suppose to do and more ending on a most satisfying note. This is entertainment. Enjoy Brian Donlevy and others as they bring to you a time and place in history where the worst of mankind came to light in the Hitler era. His followers were ruthless unforgiving maniacs who could only be stopped by killing. All reason escaped these killers and for a good reason. They all knew what they did when they did it and knew the world would find out and not forgive. That was their motivation to go all out or nothing. They got nothing thanks to people who like in this movie decided to use their own lives to stop this madness. 50 million people lost their lives because of Hitler's Germany. This movie helps you to understand the premise and to side with the ones who stopped them at all costs. Starts out nicely, builds and plays with the emotions. Then, it picks up at a rapid pace, gets intense, throws in some thrills with plenty of action and the viewer is just hooked. The good news is that it holds you for some time and then lets you exit courtesy of a decent ending that goes to shows you how quality movie making with a good story is not hard to do and beats out some of the trash out there today that supposedly costs millions of dollars too. Phooey on all that. Get yourself a nice sandwich, a tasty drink and do not be disturbed for the next two hours. Treat yourself

"Hangmen Also Die!" was made during World War II about an event—the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia— that had taken place only the year before the movie's release. So close to the event, and with the facts still classified, the filmmakers felt entirely free to make up their own version of what occurred. Since that time, at least three films about this assassination have been made, all more or less telling the same story as each other, which is very different from the one told here.The filmmakers here were the great director Fritz Lang, the scenarist Bertolt Brecht, the cinematographer James Wong Howe, and a good cast including Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan (unusually but effectively cast as a Czech professor) and Anna Lee. The story is intricately plotted, suspenseful and inspiring if fanciful.The first surprise is that, unlike later versions, this film skips over the assassination itself, opening with a scene showing Heydrich's (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) cruelty—he intends to execute 500 factory workers for poor production numbers—but then jumps to several minutes after the assassination. I had to wonder whether a reel was missing (even though this version was beautifully restored in 2012), but the film deliberately deals primarily with the aftermath of the assassination. It is a story about collaboration versus resistance to a foreign invader. The Czech underground is behind the assassination but is infiltrated by a collaborator. The Nazis round up people they will execute every day at first—and later twelve times a day—until the Czech's betray the assassin. In a fine scene, the assassin, Dr. Svoboda (Donlevy), tells the leader of the underground, Dedic (Jonathan Hale), that he wants to turn himself in to save the hundreds of men who will be executed, but Dedic presents the argument that, since Svoboda was chosen as the assassin to represent the Czech people, if he turns himself in, it is as if he surrenders the whole country to the Nazis.Meanwhile, Gruber (Alexander Granach), the Gestapo Inspector in charge of the investigation, cleverly closes in on the conspirators, even seeing through the smoke screens that they throw up for his benefit. The outcome is nevertheless more hopeful than the historical record.The tame movie conventions of portraying Nazi atrocities were still uninformed by reality in 1943. More people were more relentlessly slaughtered in retaliation for Heydrich's assassination than this film shows. For that matter, when members of the underground suffocate a Nazi under a pile of towels, it takes no time at all. This probably seemed horrible enough to 1940s moviegoers, whereas, if anything, today's movies might be more apt to exaggerate how long it takes to smother someone.Despite being made after Hollywood established its morality code, the movie toys with the notion of sex outside of marriage even though it is only part of a ruse to fool the Gestapo. Also, some characters are clearly meant to be prostitutes.The message of this film is that Czech patriots can mount their resistance without any outside help. The only nod to historical fact is that the assassin's pistol is British-made, but we are not told how the homegrown resistance came by it. In reality, all of the weapons used by the assassins were British. There was not a lone assassin, and all of the assassination team members were Czechs who had been living in exile in Britain and had to be parachuted back into Czechoslovakia. Contrary to this movie, Heydrich was not killed by bullets from a gun but died as a result of a grenade that landed behind his car seat and propelled horsehair upholstery, along with shrapnel, into his back. He suffered in agony until doctors were able to give him painkillers, but, without antibiotics, even Hitler's personal surgeon was unable to save him.Like a less funny version of "To Be or Not to Be," this cleverly plotted and beautifully photographed thriller works better dramatically than the true story. Well worth seeing, even if its history must be taken with a large grain of salt.

Very good anti-Nazi propaganda from Fritz Lang. The story concerns the real-life assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the commander in charge of the Czechoslovakian occupation. The Nazis round up a bunch of adult men in Prague and threaten to execute a number of them every day until the assassin turns himself in or is turned in. Brian Donlevy plays that assassin, a doctor working with the Czech underground. He is helped after the assassination by Anna Lee. Like all good Czech citizens, she wants to protect Donlevy, but when her own father (Walter Brennan) is taken hostage by the Nazis, she is torn. Anna Lee is one of my favorite underrated actresses from the classic era (my favorite of her performances is in the Val Lewton picture Bedlam), and she's wonderful here. Most of the rest of the cast is quite good, as well, especially Gene Lockhart as a Czech who is collaborating with the Nazis. The one big exception in the cast is Alexander Granach, who plays the chief of the Gestapo. He overacts quite a bit. The direction and story (co-written by Bertolt Brecht) are quite good, though I think it starts to get sloppy near the end. It definitely goes on a tad too long. But I very much liked it as a whole.

After Reinhard Heydrich is assassinated by the Czech resistance, the Gestapo goes all out to find his killer. Brian Donlevy gets top billing as the main star and Heydrich's killer, but the actors who portray the Gestapo officers, the Nazi matrons, and especially the one who portrays Heydrich, whom we see only in the opening scene of the movie, really give the film a sense of realism, not that Donlevy is wasted. The first scene with him in it is great, with James Wong Howe's camera right on his face as he's trying to find a room after the killing. This is as much a film about the Gestapo as it is about the resistance, thanks (perhaps) to Fritz Lang, who abandoned Germany after Hitler took power. In fact, Fritz Lang succeeds in bringing out the nuances of the resistance through Donlevy's part, the idea that one man (the killer) could (or should) surrender to the Gestapo in order to save hundreds of others from execution. And these are not faceless characters, but an actual family led by a professor played by Walter Brennan, with his daughter, the increasingly seductive Anna Lee, learning to see how this resistance works. The movie is spread a little thin at times, but develops a highly engrossing subplot involving Gene Lockhart as a wealthy Czech and Gestapo informer and his crumbling relationship with the Germans.