Alienation and Czechs that act a lot like Americans

I was chatting with a friend at Dinner today, and not paying much attention to time, so I missed a screening for a film class I’m not technically enrolled in.  Undeterred, however, I went and saw a movie on my own: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die.

 

I couldn’t help but be rather ambivalent to the film. It wasn’t quite as incredible as I was expecting, but it wasn’t Hollywood trash either.  Rather, it boasted a script by no one less than Bertolt Brecht, who’s plays and theories I’ve been enmeshed in for weeks.  How could a production with such high-end german producers fail to please?

 

Well, so far as I’ve been able to tell, the film suffered from competing interests from the start.[1]  Fritz Lang, unable to escape his habitual sentimentality even in times of crises, couldn’t accept some of the more shocking, and in my view, more realistic ideas in the original script.  Instead of alienation theory and scary actors, we are left with a Czech citizenry that seems to serve as nothing more than an analog for anti-nazism American patriotism.  Though the german accents are believable enough, the American habits and mannerisms of all the actors are distracting rather than, to use Brecht’s terms, “astonishing.”  We’re left with a thriller of credulous Nazi’s and starry-eyed heroes without any of the disturbing counter-balance Brecht and Lang are known for giving--a film with all the intrigues of M without its shocking implications.

 

There is only one scene that cut me to the quick.  As the Nazi’s haul off their victim for exectution in the final scene, he begins to plunge into hysterics.  He mouth breaks upon into a wide o, and he laughs his way in the car to a death he still can’t believe is coming.  Framed by the Czech underground he betrayed, the tragic irony of it all breaks his personality clean in two.  He composes himself only long enough to be shot fleeing from his Nazi hangmen, dying on the steps of a cathedral that chimes his literal death-knell.

 

The chiming of the bells, the image of the staggering, falling victim, breaks entirely with the next shot.  Bells shift suddenly into a triumphic cuckoo-clock behind a Nazi official’s desk.  The contrast between the execution and the banal Nazi regularity is astounding, even ‘astonishing’.  Perhaps it was the only thing Brecht could have approved of.

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[1] See, Gerd Gemünden, “Brecht in Hollywood: Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film,” TDR: The Drama Review 43, no. 4 (1999): 65-76. “Brecht, in contrast, insisted in his collaboration on Hangmen Also Die that the realistic depiction of the fight against Hitler and not the persuasion of the American movie-going audience should be the most important goal of any anti-Nazi film. Thus Brecht voiced opposition to many of Lang's directorial changes, including, for example, Lang's omission of a scene in which Brecht had depicted the hostages as showing signs of anti-Semitism only minutes prior to their own execution. According to Brecht, this scene was to convey the startling and contradictory impact of totalitarianism on the population. In a similar vein, a scene of mourners at a mass grave--a scene that would have constituted the first on-screen depiction of Jewish victims of the Nazi terror (McGilligan 1997:296), and one that Brecht and Wexley had particularly wanted--was not included in the final cut. For Brecht, more important than emotional engineering was instructing the American audience about the historical roots of German national socialism, and challenging the common perception that all Germans were Nazis. But thinking beyond the American audience, Brecht was hoping that a quasidocumentary film would emerge that could be shown to German audiences once Hitler was defeated. “

 

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