Blu-ray Review: Hangmen Also Die (1943)

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AKA: Never Surrender; Lest We Forget; Hangmen Also Die! 

Even without any knowledge of the real-life complications, confrontations or compromises that comprised the offscreen push-and-pull power struggle of director Fritz Lang and his co-scripter Berlot Brecht on the 1942-43 production of their fact-based WWII passion project, viewers are able to sense clashes in tone, style, structure and character just by watching this – the final result.

Dubbed Hangmen Also Die by a quick-thinking secretary who garnered a hundred dollars and a place in motion picture history for her clever suggestion – as it turns out, even the question of what to call the work divided Lang and Brecht’s sole collaboration, ultimately resulting in the latter never making another hands-on picture in the United States.

Restored for Cohen Film Collection Blu-ray by Pinewood Studios and the British Film Institute (BFI), the legend of the Lang vs. Brecht title fight is in all reality just the tip of the iceberg of what amounts to an impressively made if disappointingly uneven tale of World War II suspense.

An anti-Nazi epic all the same and one given double the air of authenticity considering that it was crafted by German émigrés who’d fled Hitler’s stranglehold on their homeland during the time period, Fritz Lang had intended Hangmen to be another one of his efficiently executed, crisply-paced Noir thrillers.

With this in mind, the Austrian born director drew on both his personal and professional background as a German expressionist master craftsman who’d helped define the look of the Noir genre (in classics like Metropolis, M and Fury) along with the shadow heavy cinematography by legendary lensman James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success).

Unfortunately by swinging like a pendulum around a large number of characters on both sides of the Czechoslovakian Resistance’s assassination plot to take out Moravia “Hangman” and Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia Reinhard Heydrich, Hangmen Also Die loses the taut rhythm and breakneck pace that grabbed hold of us in the nail-biter of a beginning.

Gradually getting bogged down by endless speechmaking, instead of the terse, suspenseful thriller Lang had intended, ultimately we're left with an overly-long message movie that’s far too light on tension.

And unfortunately after such an ambitious first act, Hangmen loses its steely focus on a core group of Czechs who have to improvise after part of their plot collapses and leaves the assassin without a getaway car.

For what started as a cat-and-mouse espionage movie (wherein everyday citizens must ask themselves how much they’re willing to risk and/or sacrifice when threatened by the Gestapo) soon begins to veer off in too many directions.

And this misstep escalates – magnifying the film's flaws – thereby making the already lengthy 135 minute work (which adds in an extra minute of previously unreleased footage) feel as long as Brecht’s original 280 page draft.

Whittled down to 190 screen-minutes by three additional writers and translators (all with different styles and interests in where they wanted to story to go), when added together, Hangmen had at any given time as least five storytellers assigned to the same overcrowded, undeniably complicated personal project with each one on a completely different page.

Needless to say, you're left with a prime example of too many cooks in the kitchen without a head chef corralling all the ingredients into one recipe. And as such it’s easy to understand why the film collapsed under the weight of a structure that's constantly shifting like a foundation after each new earthquake-like rewrite by talented scripters (including Angels With Dirty Faces scribe John Wexley).

A nonetheless worthwhile find for Lang fans, especially given Cohen’s lush restoration, Hangmen also offers a decidedly unique look at a different part of the war by focusing on brave, unsung Czech heroes who were willing to lay down their lives if it meant they were able to put the Third Reich’s notorious hangman in a literal or figurative noose.

And this goal clearly helped the film strike a chord with western audiences in its 1943 release as U.S. and British viewers (many of whose loved ones were fighting overseas) were only too happy to stand up and cheer for the demise of Hitler’s regime, which had forced so many artists like Lang and Brecht to leave their ancestral home.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Fox Cinema Archives DVD Review: Kentucky (1938)

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He may have been typecast and he was definitely too young for most of the roles he was offered but when it came right down to it, nobody played an old man better than Walter Brennan.

A character actor before there ever was such a term, although he played old men nearly his entire career, there was never anything caricature-based or disingenuous about Brennan's portrayals (whether he was cantankerous, charming or a curmudgeon) and he never played the exact same man twice.

In 1938, Brennan was only 44 years old when he portrayed a character roughly double his age in a performance that would garner him an Academy Award and help inspire the Walter Brennan "type" he was sought to inhabit again and again.

Yet Brennan’s ferociously lively and powerful turn in Kentucky is so good that even though he was a mere supporting player, his presence loomed large over not only the main romantic star-crossed lovers plotline at its core but Brennan also dominated scenes in which he didn’t even appear.

The best of his early state-name horse pictures including Home in Indiana and Maryland, White Fang and Calamity Jane filmmaker David Butler’s winning drama has been brought back to digital life thanks to a lush DVD transfer as part of Fox Cinema Archives’ latest wave of manufactured-on-demand classic films.

Released this past spring, Fox’s debut of Kentucky (which was based on John Taintor Foote’s story The Look of Eagles) as part of the Archive series was well-timed to coincide not only with the recent Oscars telecast but also the Kentucky Derby.

It's a compelling work that grabs you from its remarkable period prologue. The film revolves around a Romeo and Juliet or – to use a more American reference – Hatfield and McCoy style feud between two Kentucky families that began when being on opposite sides of the Civil War resulted in Goodwin blood being spilled by a member of the Dillon family.

Seventy-five years after he saw his father gunned down during a disagreement over letting Union soldiers take their champion thoroughbred horses, Brennan’s Peter Goodwin has vowed never to have anything to do with the Dillons.

But when the youngest member of the Dillon tree (played by Richard Greene) falls for Loretta Young’s beautiful Goodwin lass from afar, he vows to put aside the bad blood between them in order to follow his heart.

Yet when history repeats itself in the form of more deadly betrayal, gossip and lies, the feud is forced back onto the front burner as the Kentucky Derby draws nearer, predictably pitting the two families against each other.

Admittedly, it’s hard to watch the cringe-inducing, degrading way that African-American actors are used in the movie as essentially cartoonish buffoons. However, if you’re able to look past it and keep the film’s time period in mind (given our contemporary era of political correctness, which was sadly, regrettably nonexistent in 1938), then you’ll appreciate the rest of the picture as a richly made, thoroughly engrossing piece of pre-WWII entertainment.

A beautifully lensed Technicolor horse epic from cinematographers Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, this Daryl F. Zanuck production may show its age with regard to the aforementioned racial insensitivities and a few clunky edits that don’t flow smoothly by waiting a long while to follow up on gaps in logic.

Nonetheless, it’s buoyed by its convincing cast and the timeless tale of lovers whose romance thrives despite which side of the horsetrack they’re from.

Likewise, Kentucky’s strongest asset is in the always timeless Walter Brennan who, despite mastering the art of defying time on and offscreen always made us think of his age as an afterthought when contrasted with the larger-than-life personalities of the characters he embodied throughout his enviable career... starting with his Oscar wining turn as a Kentucky horseman.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review: Red River (1948)

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Related Essay:
Rio Bravo

Although he embraced nearly every genre from adventure to Film Noir to screwball comedy throughout his enviable career (and didn’t shy away from blending several together in the span of a single film’s running time), technically speaking, 1948’s Red River was Howard Hawks’ first western.

Admittedly that’s an amazing feat when you consider the film’s overall complexity. Yet as a character driven storyteller less concerned with traditional structure and formula than he was in spinning a memorable yarn, Red River had all the hallmarks of a Hawks classic.

Coming right off the heels of To Have and To Have Not and The Big Sleep — both of which starred Humphrey Bogart — Hawks dared to cast the white-Stetson clad, All-American cowboy hero John Wayne in a role that was decidedly better suited to guy like Bogart whose screen fedoras and Stetsons typically ranged in color from black to gray.

A subversive casting decision, Hawks also aimed to rip that black hat/white hat surface level philosophy to shreds.

While we get the impression The Duke begins the film like the heroic cowboy we’d all come to know and love from movies like Stagecoach, within River's first act Hawks gives audiences their first glimpse of Duke as a Noir tinged antihero after he makes a fatal mistake by not bringing his lady love with him to settle land and build a cattle empire.

Losing her to frontier violence in a (thankfully) offscreen Native American attack, Wayne’s hardened Tom may have lost his beloved but he unexpectedly gains an adoptive son.

Taking a young boy named Matt under his wing who’d likewise lost everyone he’d had to old western violence as well, Tom becomes the veritable father to the child who grows to become Montgomery Clift.

Jumping ahead in time until the end of the war which found land overtaken by carpetbaggers and all of the money depleted from the south, Tom and Matt decide to go where they can make a living by organizing a late nineteenth century cattle drive from Texas all the way to Missouri along the Chisholm Trail.

A post WWII cinematic study of evolving masculinity across two generations as contrasted by Wayne’s hard-hearted tyrannical patriarch and Clift's sensitive, contemplative, level-headed veteran who’s experienced violence as a survivor and a soldier embodied by the actor in his first screen role, Red River is also another in a long line of father/son, mentor/protégée male “love stories” that would populate Hawks’ career.

Essentially a new variation of an old storyline and/or an unofficial thematic sequel to Only Angels Have Wings which he made a decade earlier and would follow up with again each decade with new screen interpretations such as Rio Bravo in the ‘50s and El Dorado in the ‘60s, Red River was a character-driven western first and foremost.

Distinctly Hawksian with its screwball “three cushion dialogue” that talked around points like characters were shooting pool and aiming for rebounds and style points, in the oeuvre of Hawks, the women served as dialogue-heavy aggressors — articulating things that the men in their lives would never bring themselves to admit like Jean Arthur in Wings, Bacall in Have and Sleep or Angie Dickinson in Bravo.

Thus, following suit, it's a role that the filmmaker’s contracted second choice of Joanne Dru was given in River that she managed to play pretty damn well despite lacking the presence of the other stars (and a rushed ending that even the director concedes just never worked completely right in any way, shape or form when contrasted with the rest of the picture).

And although Hawks was inspired by master western filmmaker John Ford, Red River was the first film that convinced Ford that “the son of a bitch” Wayne could actually act, thereby facilitating the next phase in Duke's evolving role in subversive ‘50s and ‘60s masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Yet more than just awe-inspiring for what it did for Wayne’s career, it’s also a fascinating historical document to illustrate the change in screen acting.

For not only did River launch newcomer Clift’s career but as such it also inspired a new generation of actors from Marlon Brando to James Dean and Paul Newman to embrace the natural, Stanislavski method as opposed to the demonstrative expressive “show me” technique popularized in the '20s and ‘30s.

While Hawks was the first to discount his skills as a filmmaker by giving credit elsewhere (such as second unit director Arthur Rosson or cinematographer Russell Harlan), or acknowledging the role that luck played in helping him execute an occasional poetic “John Ford shot,” the film is still influential.

Cinematically, this is particularly evident given the way that — much like the friendships that occur throughout his filmography between an older man and a younger one based on their professional camaraderie and ability as fliers, fighters etc. — he liked to rely on his actors’ talents to play things out when it came to his edits.

Cutting on movement rather than action shots to keep edits hidden in order to spotlight the actors so you know that it’s really Walter Brennan driving that wagon across the river, Wayne catching a shotgun and handily firing three times or Clift hopping into the stirrup to get on his saddle, Hawks ensures a sense of realism and masculine cool simultaneously.

Likewise, from a narrative perspective, he preferred to open sequences (and frequently his films) with a fast-paced action-packed moment that gets us right into the story before slowing things down to bring us up to speed with explanations or expositions.

By way of this effect, Hawks once again achieves with his camera the same billiard like rebounds and style points that take a backward way into traditional storytelling, which he frequently utilized with his famous “three cushion dialogue” as he discussed with Peter Bogdanovich in his book Who the Devil Made It.

And knowing him better than most, Bogdanovich makes a welcome appearance as a film scholar on the Criterion set, offering key insights and behind-the-scenes information that makes a great companion to the Hawks chapter of Devil.

Gorgeously restored to a sharp, high definition sheen, The Criterion Collection serves up both definitive versions of Hawks’s adaptation of the Boren Chase novel that the author had shortened into a Saturday Evening Post story which he translated into screenplay form alongside Charles Schnee.

Also including the out-of-print original novel with the impressive dual format edition box set that boasts the film in DVD and Blu-ray for a total of four discs, the collection serves up Hawks’ preferred theatrical edition along with the longer “book version.”

Despite being unauthorized by the filmmaker, the book version that is lacking Walter Brennan’s audible narration boasts an ending that’s closest to the one that the helmer had intended.

Threatened with legal action by the litigious Howard Hughes, who felt like Hawks had repurposed the ending he’d written for Hughes’s The Outlaw before he’d been fired, while there honestly isn’t that much of a difference between the two cuts which due to Dru’s rushed, ineffective delivery Hawks has never actually liked all that much, it’s still interesting to see the two back-to-back.

And while I agree that the tone moves from too deathly serious to too jovial ultimately — as Hawks had always emphasized — the film is less fixated on the girl than it is on the relationship between the two generations of men.

Elevated by the compelling interplay between the leads whose dynamic is analyzed in a fascinating new light in the gender and sexuality focused nonfiction study Masked Men which I read during a film school project that dissected Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Red River is not only of the director’s very favorite films he’s ever made (along with Scarface) but it’s one of my very favorite westerns.

The first genre work that actually opened my eyes to what can be achieved in a western, perhaps Red River is so unique because of its novelty as not only the director’s first western but also Clift’s first film and Wayne’s first challenging role.

And while I'm sure the film was liberating to the actors, it's a distinctly Hawksian achievement all-around.

Without the weight of previous genre efforts impacting his thought process, Hawks was uninhibited and free to let the lessons he’d learned on everything from Bringing Up Baby to Only Angels Have Wings and The Big Sleep inspire him to make his own kind of western.

And that’s precisely what Howard Hawks did in Red River, which finds the filmmaker producing the work on his own — less focused on rules or formula than he was determined to capture a stampede of character, conflict, cattle and celluloid to see exactly what type of cinematic endeavor he could achieve.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Fox Cinema Archives DVD Review: Home in Indiana (1944)

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Trying to recapture the success of earlier Walter Brennan horse centered vehicles such as Maryland and Kentucky by teaming up with celebrated cowboy picture helmer Henry Hathaway (who’s perhaps best known for directing the original True Grit), Home in Indiana delivered on its ambitions with a likable coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water approach that finds Lon McCallister in his first major role.

As a male version of what today’s audiences would most likely recognize as the Flicka storyline, McCallister is excellent as big city troublemaker Sparke Thornton who’s taken in by relatives in Indiana.

Sneaking off to the stables next door instead of going to school, Sparke leads a double life, learning how to handle horses alongside his beautiful neighbors played by fellow breakout stars Jeanne Crain and June Haver (nicknamed “The Pocket Grable” after fellow Fox star Betty Grable) by day and pretending he’s tired from days filled with reading, writing and arithmetic by night.

Nominated for an Academy Award for its rich Technicolor cinematography, the warmly made, wholesome family film which has been given new cinematic life on DVD thanks to this Fox Cinema Archives release rivals contemporary fare in terms of quality and has hardly aged a day in this gorgeous presentation, except perhaps in terms of its admittedly broad portrayals of African-American stable hands.

Although at the same time, you must give Twentieth Century Fox credit for being ahead of its time in depicting an interracial friendship between Sparke and another horse enthusiast.

Best viewed in the spirit of lighthearted entertainment with which it was made, Home in Indiana plays exceptionally well to the nostalgia-inclined viewers or for families with tweens eager to expose their children to something that isn’t filled with product placements and/or manufactured gimmicks.

A terrific re-release of the picture which was based on the Saturday Evening Post story “The Phantom Filly” by George Agnew Chamberlain that was remade as the movie musical April Love in 1957, Home in Indiana is now available as part of Fox Cinema Archive’s newest wave of stellar DVD debuts of long out-of-print works which have hit stores online over the past few months.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.