Hangmen Also Die!

Hangmen Also Die! (1943) is Fritz Lang's wartime resistance thriller, free to watch online on iFILM. In occupied Prague, a surgeon guns down Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich and slips into the crowd, a bullet in his side.

Wounded and hunted, he's sheltered by history professor Stephen Novotny and his daughter Mascha. The Gestapo answers with collective punishment: hundreds of hostages, shot in batches until someone names the assassin. The underground fights back the only way left — by feeding the occupiers a guilty man of their own choosing. Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan and Anna Lee carry a city where every silence has a price.

Lang co-wrote the script with Bertolt Brecht, the playwright's lone Hollywood credit, and Hanns Eisler's nervy score landed an Oscar nomination. Shot barely a year after Heydrich's real killing, the film's fury is anything but staged. A hard, grown-up story about how fear both breaks people and binds them. Stream Hangmen Also Die! (1943) online on iFILM.