The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Podcast for Social Research, Episode 92.5: Hangmen Also Die! — a Brief Film Guide

·54 min·2 clips

One assassin's gun jammed immediately, yet another managed to hit the car with an anti-tank mine that did explode.

This episode is a film guide to Fritz Lang's 1943 anti-fascist film *Hangmen Also Die!*, hosted by Brooklyn Institute for Social Research faculty members Izzy Litke and Jude Weber. They analyze the movie's creation as a collaboration between director Fritz Lang and playwright Bertolt Brecht, conceived weeks after the real 1942 assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich. The discussion positions the film as a complex cultural object blending propaganda, epic theater, and Hollywood genres. The hosts first detail the true historical events: Czech paratroopers trained by the British Special Operations Executive assassinated Heydrich, who later died from sepsis, leading to massive Nazi reprisals including the destruction of Lidice. Litke explains Brecht and Lang's conscious departure from this history to frame the Czech masses, not an individual assassin, as the film's protagonist. The script was developed with screenwriter John Wexley, known for the anti-Nazi film *Confessions of a Nazi Spy*. Brecht intended the film as epic theater, using techniques to provoke intellectual judgment rather than emotional catharsis, evident in scenes like a character correcting another's mistake with the phrase "the underground makes mistakes that the people correct." A key tension arose because Brecht criticized Lang for making Hollywood concessions, like including a scene where a resistance leader hides behind a curtain during a Gestapo search. Composer Hans Eisler's score, written while co-authoring a book with Theodor Adorno, uses a dissonant twelve-tone passage and incorporates the Czech national anthem to create an estrangement effect. Eisler also subtly quoted the communist anthem "The Internationale" in the film's final song. Jude Weber adds that the film was an independent production under United Artists, not the Hollywood studio system. Brecht lamented in his diaries that the story became a bourgeois national uprising instead of a proletarian revolution. The film premiered in Prague, Oklahoma, in March 1943, where the town hung effigies of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini. Weber contextualizes the film within the American Popular Front, a 1930s-40s alliance of New Deal liberals and communists united by anti-fascism, which pushed for U.S. intervention in World War II. Key Popular Front figures like poet Archibald MacLeish led the Office of War Information, which produced propaganda like *Casablanca*. A striking production choice was casting American actors with working-class accents, like Walter Brennan, to play the Czech resistance, creating solidarity for U.S. audiences; Brennan later became a right-wing John Birch Society member. Dialogue references to "Valley Forge" and speeches echoing *The Grapes of Wrath* anchor the Czech struggle in American left-populist imagery. A surprising insight is that the actual assassins died by suicide in a church crypt after a prolonged siege, a failure for German intelligence. The film's most Brechtian musical moment occurs in a cinema where a German cultural film about the Rhine is paired with the Czech composer Smetana's *Má vlast*. Eisler's diegetic music includes a kitschy, deliberately bad rendition of Wagner in a Nazi-only bar. The hosts note the irony that the film's anti-fascist message was mainstream enough for a 1943 Oklahoma premiere, contrasting sharply with today's political climate. Brecht's original script included more explicit class tension, such as a portly, decadent poet being contrasted with a worker-poet, which Lang softened. The tone is analytical and educational, drawing from film studies, political history, and critical theory in a conversational format between two knowledgeable faculty members. It is dense with historical anecdotes and production details, assuming listener familiarity with mid-century European history and film theory. This episode would deeply engage film students, history buffs interested in World War II propaganda, and listeners fascinated by the intersection of art and politics. Those seeking light entertainment or a straightforward film review might find the academic depth and historical tangents less appealing.

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