Wednesday | April 3, 2002 9:00 pm

Hangmen Also Die

Screening on Film

Directed by Fritz Lang.
With Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee.
US, 1943, 35mm, black & white, 130 min.

The May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich—notorious Nazi commander of occupied Czechoslovakia whose brutality earned him the nickname “Hitler’s Hangman”—and the bloody German reprisal that ensued in the streets of Prague were the inspiration for Lang’s collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on this fiction film. To be sure, only a few Brechtian touches remain: in particular, the film’s emphasis on the solidarity of the Czech people in hiding Heydrich’s assassin and framing a Nazi collaborator. Communist catchwords like “masses” and “comrades” were expunged from the script, but Hanns Eisler managed to smuggle the tune of the 1929 “Comintern Song” into the score and received an Oscar nomination from an unsuspecting Academy.