HANGMEN ALSO DIE
For some reason (probably the title) I'd always assumed that this 1943 film by Fritz Lang was a film noir. In fact, it's a bit of an oddity, being set in occupied Czechoslovakia in 1942, and centred on a real event - the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a senior Nazi known as "The Hangman of Europe". The film is based on a story by Lang and Bertold Brecht, which departs from the truth in having the assassination be by a Czech surgeon, Svoboda, somewhat implausibly played by Brian Donlevy. Svoboda takes refuge with a family headed by Professor Novotny, played by Walter Brennan, whose daughter Mascha (Anna Lee) emerges as the main character in the ensuing tale. The Nazis take several hundred citizens, including the Professor, as hostages, and start executing handfuls of them at regular intervals to put pressure on the locals to betray Svobòda. How this situation is resolved is told by way of a quite complicated plot which involves numerous characters, both membe...