Hangmen Also Die! (1943) on Netflix
Passed19432h 14mDramaFilm-NoirThriller
In occupied Prague, surgeon Franticek Svoboda shoots Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich and is wounded. Professor Stephen Novotny and his daughter Mascha hide him from the Gestapo.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb7.4/107,467 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Prague during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the surgeon Franticek Svoboda, a member of the Czech resistance, shoots the Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the official known as the Hangman of Europe. Wounded, and with his getaway car found, he is refused at the safe house he had planned. A stranger, Mascha, deliberately sends the German soldiers hunting him the wrong way, so he seeks shelter at her home. Her father, the history professor Stephen Novotny, works out that Svoboda is the assassin and chooses to hide him anyway. With the assassin still at large, four hundred Czech men are seized as hostages, forty to be executed at a time until he surrenders or is denounced. Professor Novotny is among the hostages, and Mascha asks Svoboda to give himself up.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hangmen Also Die! (1943)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The real Reinhard Heydrich was killed by Czechoslovak soldiers parachuted from a British plane in Operation Anthropoid, but that was not known when the film was made, so his killer is shown as a Czech resistance member with Communist Party ties.
- John Wexley received sole credit for the screenplay after giving evidence to the Writers Guild that Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang had only worked on the story, and was blacklisted after being named a communist in HUAC hearings.
- Hangmen Also Die was Bertolt Brecht's only American film credit, and the money he earned from it is said to have enabled him to write The Visions of Simone Machard, Schweik in the Second World War and an adaptation of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
- When a book with a title similar to the working titles "Never Surrender" or "No Surrender" was published during production, the producers held a contest for the cast and crew to suggest a new title; a production secretary won the $100 prize.
- Fritz Lang considered opening the film with Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "The Murder of Lidice" but decided against it, and the poem instead appears in MGM's Heydrich film Hitler's Madman (1943).
