[Revisit Review]
Funny story...Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! was the eleventh film that I ever reviewed for my first film blog Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear. I decided to re-watch it so I could have some context for my upcoming review of Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944), another one of his war-time American pictures about Nazism. And I was shocked to discover that Hangmen Also Die! didn't hold up at all. Now I find the film painfully bloated and overlong. Many scenes contain great immediacy and power, particularly those involving the Gestapo interrogating Czechoslovakian citizens and members of the Underground Resistance. If the film had focused solely on these (and been only around 90 minutes) then this film would have been sensational. But too much time is given over to Reinhard Heydrich's assassin, the family that hides him, and the 400 civilians arrested and sentenced to death during the ensuing investigation. As such, the film fails to cohere into a concrete whole.
6/10
I like the idea of these revisit reviews. It will be interesting to see which films hold up for you, and which (like this one) do not.
ReplyDeleteHeh. Thanks! I gotta say...I hate it when films that I once loved don't hold up...
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