Fritz on Fridays: Hangmen Also Die!

On the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations with relevant critics, scholars and filmmakers about Lang’s influence and filmography.

World War II and the Holocaust changed everything about our world. Politics, borders and our very way of seeing would never be the same. Art changed, too. With the war in their backyards, the great artists and intellectuals of Europe — Jewish and non-Jewish — fled and sought refuge elsewhere, as did the masses. And cinema, the youngest of the great art forms, proved the most impressionable in the face of war and genocide.

These dark circumstances brought together two of the most important artistic German expatriates living anywhere in the world, Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht, who were living in the United States, for Hangmen Also Die! The two were a match designed by the gods of cinema even if the apocalyptic circumstances uniting them were nothing short of godless. They created one of the truly great Hollywood films from the studio era.

The 1943 film was released just over a year after the United States entered the war and was among Lang’s earlier advertently and explicitly (anti) “Nazi films.” His expertise in craft, suspense and pace meets the subversion of Brecht, the German Leftist playwright behind the influential dialectical theatre movement, and together they made an irrevocable statement of communal solidarity and authoritarian resistance. Brecht’s school of thought wanted audiences to consider themselves and art in relation to reality and real-world politics. He wasn’t a likely bedfellow for Hollywood, and this would be his only experience in the American industry.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.