Customer Reviews

Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

PIERREPOINT: THE LAST HANGMAN is one of those films that emerges from the cracks in the theater 'failures' only to find its poignant message when released on DVD. Granted, the idea of a story based on England's most famous executioner doesn't immediately catch the interest of the general audience, but for those fortunate enough to either rent or buy this DVD, the rewards are plentiful. It is a little masterpiece of writing, acting, directing and production values.

Albert Pierrepoint was the third man in his family to 'ascend' to the list of executioners (capital punishment in England at the time was by hanging), and when he is accepted to the list in 1932 he begins what became the longest and most prolific career of British executioners. He took enormous pride in his work, assuring his peers as well as his 'victims' that every aspect of his job was done with obsessive professionalism: his timing of his duties was the shortest on record, meaning that from the moment he opened the door to the condemned prisoner's room through the hooding and noose placement and tripping of the platform and subsequent death of the 'criminal', he spared suffering as much as was feasible. He was supported by a wife who kept the secret of her husband's anonymous role and it was only when the Pierrepoint's pride in his job became known that downfall of their lives is threatened. At times adored by the public for his assignment to hand the Nazi criminals and the famous murderers and eventually the target of the anti capital punishment activists, Pierrepoint's professionalism sustained him until a final tragic assignment changed his view of his job.

Timothy Spall is splendid as Pierrepoint, capturing all of the nuances of the simple, honest man's pride as well as his Achilles' heel. Juliet Stevenson turns in yet another understated and completely realized role as Pierrepoint's wife. Director Adrian Shergold, using a script written by Bob Mills and Jeff Pope, paces the film sensitively, drawing on the atrocious duties involved in the job of executioner (they actually had to prepare the bodies of the dead victims for the morticians!) along with the moments of pub frivolity to allow the audience to understand the true person Timothy Spall absorbs in his portrayal of Pierrepoint. The sets and lighting and cinematography could not be better. This is a film to view and absorb and appreciate the superior quality of acting of Spall and Stevenson. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, December 07

Finally,constant supporting actor for over thirty years, Timothy Spall snares a leading role opposite the equally amazing Juliet Stevenson to bring to the screen the story of Albert Pierrepoint, the last English hangman. Pierrepoint, like his father and uncle before him was appointed Britain's Chief Executioner from 1933-1955 during which he personally oversaw 600+ hangings, including the famous Nazi War Criminal trials from Belsen Camp.He approaches every hanging as all in a day's work.His wife,masterfully embodied by Juliet Stevenson, chooses to know nothing of her husband's job.But, how long can something of this nature stay under the radar screen without it affecting them personally and as a couple? For people who like intense,well-acted films,look no farther that the noose right in front of your face! Easily one of the best acting jobs of late.

****1/2

Albert Pierrepoint is determined to carry on in the time-honored tradition of his family. That's why, like his father and uncle before him, Pierrepoint has trained to become one of England's premier executioners, a man who approaches his grim job with the utmost professionalism, priding himself on using scientific precision to make his hangings the quickest and most "humane" in all the world. Indeed, with his careful calibrations and emotional detachment, he manages to turn capital punishment into nothing short of an art form. So sterling is his reputation, in fact, that he is called upon by none other than Field Marshall Montgomery himself to supervise the hanging of dozens of convicted Nazi leaders after the war. This elevates Pierrepoint to something of a national celebrity in the eyes of a war-weary, revenge-crazed public, a position he neither craves for himself nor truly knows how to cope with, for it calls into question the dignity of the entire profession.

Based on a true story, "Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman" offers a fascinating glimpse into a rarely explored, though frequently reviled, profession and the type of man best fit to carry it out. Filled with insight and depth and - dare we say it? - a certain amount of "gallow's humor," the movie makes no moral judgment on Pierrepoint as a person (at least until he does so himself); for much of the film, he is simply a man doing his job to the best of his capabilities, primarily concerned with making the exit from this world as speedy and painless a one for the men and women on the other end of the rope as is humanly possible. Pierrepoint refuses to see his "victims" as anything but human beings who, for that reason alone and regardless of what heinous crime they might have committed to have brought them to this point, deserve at least a modicum of dignity and respect in their final moments on earth. And he's determined to give at least that much to them. But no man can remain completely detached from the business he chooses to engage in, especially when it is as grim as this one is, and eventually Pierrepoint has to come to terms with the things he's seen and the things he's done in the course of that chosen profession. That day of reckoning is brought about by a strange twist of fate that sends Pierrepoint reeling, forcing him to reexamine what it is exactly he's so proudly and meticulously dedicated his life to.

As written by Bob Mills and Jeff Pope and directed by Adrian Shergold, "Pierrepoint" is itself so detached in spirit and tone - at least in its first two-thirds - that it becomes an ironic commentary on the dehumanization that lies at the very heart of capital punishment. But then, without making a fuss of it or in any way grinding its tonal gears, the movie, in its final half-hour, turns into an emotionally devastating plea against continuing the practice of state-approved killing (which England did, in fact, do in 1965), as seen through the eyes of one man who got to experience it up-close-and-personal.

As Pierrepoint, Timothy Spall delivers a performance that can only be termed a masterpiece of internalized understatement, while Juliet Stevenson is his perfect match as the subtly avaricious wife who is both supportive of what he is doing and secretly repelled by it at one and the same time.

On every level possible, this is a truly extraordinary work.

This is a biographical story of England's most proficient hangman from 1933 to 1955. Albert A. Pierrepoint hanged 608 people in his service to the state. Timothy Spall, who did such a fine job as the craven son in "The Sheltering Sky" turns in a fine performance as Pierrepoint.
There is a strong resemblance to Robert Morley in his profile. Juliet Stevenson, as his devoted wife Annie, does an equally fine job.

Spall wonderfully conveys his open-mouthed shock as he receives his first training in how to treat the person to be hanged. When he finishes his training and tells his mother and uncle that he has made His Majesty's Executioner's list he expresses his feeling that it is only natural for him. He believes that hanging is in his blood since his deceased father was also one of the Crown's hangmen.

Between the time of his first day of training to his first hanging Pierrepoint has enabled himself utter detachment from the person to be hanged. This is most vividly conveyed in the face he adopts at each hanging as he puts a bag on the head of the condemned. His efficiency is displayed in the care he takes to manually place the condemned in the precise spot for a smooth hanging. The coldness of the protocol is chillingly well performed.

Pierrepoint takes no pleasure in the hangings. He carries out his duty without question through most of the film. His objective is to hang the condemned quickly and efficiently in order to minimize suffering. As with anyone who has a repugnant job Pierrepoint uses his emotional detachment to insulate himself from the moral questions raised by his profession.

However, when he is paid the high compliment of meeting one of England's greatest war heroes, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, his conversation about the interview with Annie has a strange and eerie tone of excitement and pleasure with being Monty's choice as the Nazi executioner. They gleefully discuss Pierrepoint's interview as though Montgomery had complimented him as the best soccer player in England rather than the best man to execute Nazi war criminals.

He has regained his professional detachment in the hanging of the large number of Nazi war criminals, men and women, who were the devilish stewards of the Belsen concentration camp. While viewing the prisoners with his military attache at his side, the aide begins to describe their war crimes to Pierrepoint. Their crimes are hideous but Pierrepoint wants none of it. He memorably chides the military attache to "...concentrate on height, weight, and physical condition. That way we'll get the job done quickly and efficiently."

He leaves the judging to others. Pierrepoint feels that once hanged the dead have paid the price and should be treated with dignity as he expresses earlier in the film about another condemned prisoner. It is this unique ethic of compassion which helps him survive in his hangman's world. His reaction to the shortage of a coffin for one of the Nazi hanged further re-vivifies his construct of the moral world in which he operates.

He also treasures his anonymity. When he is exposed as the Nazi hangman by an enterprising reporter he is uncomfortable even though he is lionized by the general public. Eventually, as public attitudes harden against capital punishment his status as a lion is changed to "killer." Following the hanging of a condemned prisoner that, to his surprise, Pierrepoint knows personally, and the hanging of the last woman hanged in the UK (Ruth Ellis in 1955), Pierrepoint and Annie realize that his moral compass is broken and he is too conflicted to continue as a hangman. He submits his resignation and the film ends.

The greatest weakness of the movie is the emphasis on the number of hangings depicted rather than a deeper examination of the conflicts created for Pierrepoint by his profession. The theme is present but it is too briefly shown. It is not adequately conveyed by a sleepless night and a brief acknowledgment to a friend that he does have inner conflict about his profession.

Examining the deeper questions raised by a film like this can make the difference between a good, entertaining movie and a great one that explores the complex issues of human character. This movie misses that opportunity, though Pierrepoint's final quote from 1974 at the end of the film does come to an interesting conclusion. Capital punishment was abolished in the UK in 1969. The last actual execution was carried out in 1964-by hanging.

One fiscal matter should be mentioned. This movie is overpriced in a $10-13 price range. I bought the movie because of the possibilities I saw in the story and due to a good, but somewhat deceptive, advertisement of the plot. It is not worth buying in that price range. Give it time and the price is sure to fall. I think it would be more reasonably priced at $4-6.

Albert Pierrepoint was a paragon of lower-middle-class respectability. He and his wife, Annie, lived in a small, tidy house. His favorite supper was pork chop. He was not too keen a man, but serious about those things he held important. Annie was loyal, kept a quiet house and served his meals on time. They had no children. Albert Pierrepoint's job was delivering wholesale supplies to markets. He also had a part-time job, a job he didn't speak about. He hanged people. He did so punctiliously, with dedication and decency. Albert Pierrepoint, according to the movie, was the United Kingdom's last chief hangman. It was a job that ran in his family. His father and uncle were official hangmen, too. Between 1933 and 1955, Pierrepoint hanged over 600 people. Nearly a third were Nazi war criminals.

He took with pride and seriousness his duties. When called to perform a hanging he always took the train to the prison site, stayed a night, insisted upon a hot meal, and became so proficient he was able to move the prisoner from the holding cell to the gallows and then to the drop in an average of little more than 11 seconds. His best time was 7.5 seconds, but some believe this prisoner cooperated by stepping to the noose even faster than Pierrepoint. He believed that when a prisoner was hanged the person's guilt was cleansed. He treated the body with respect, cleaning it carefully (the relaxation of the sphincter muscles can sometimes cause a loss of dignity for the dead), and insisting on a coffin of proper size.

He was a dedicated practitioner of his craft. Over time he developed a useful chart that analyzed body weight, body height and rope length, He used the chart to insure that the length of the rope was exactly what was required for the drop to break the neck cleanly between the second and third vertebrae. Before Pierrepoint's analysis and his chart, many hangings resulted in slow strangulation if the prisoner was not heavy and the drop too short, or in snapping off of the prisoner's head if the prisoner was heavy and the drop too long. Either situation can result in discomfort for those observing and acute professional embarrassment for the hangman.

Albert Pierrepoint's life changed abruptly when his work executing Nazis (he was personally selected for the job by Field Marshal Montgomery) became public knowledge. He became a hero to the British public. He resigned his duties in 1956 over a disputed payment. He and Annie continued to run the pub he had bought partly with his earnings from the Nazi executions. Later, he became a target for those opposed to capital punishment. He died, full of years, in 1992 in a nursing home.

As with many biographical and social-issue movies, the director enjoys cleverness and has a social bone to pick, in this case, capital punishment. Just be aware that Albert Pierrepoint is magnificently portrayed by that wonderful actor, Timothy Spall. Juliet Stevenson, one of Britain's great actresses and who is bound to be made a Dame one of these years, is just as good as Annie Pierrepoint. They are worth seeing the picture for, regardless of your tolerance, or lack of it, for hanging Nazis to a Strauss waltz or for the director's willingness to stretch or invent things to make his social point. While the movie, for example, says Pierrepoint managed over 600 hangings, the best research according to some puts the number at about 425 (still a number any conscientious hangman could be proud of). Pierrepoint wasn't the last of the United Kingdom's hangmen and he wasn't really a hangman for the United Kingdom. The movie's emphasis on Pierrepoint's disillusion with capital punishment avoids Pierrepoint's own equivocations. As many directors might say, these are just quibbles that get in the way of a larger artistic truth.

For all of the Strauss waltzes, the hangings are shown in grim detail and in close-ups. There is not the slightest attempt to avoid the truth that killing people in cold blood, even if the state demands it, requires that aspect of our nature which is hard to reconcile with our basic beliefs and our daily lives. There are times when I found the movie difficult to watch. At least two of the persons Pierrepoint hanged were later found innocent and, to the joy of their corpses, given posthumous pardons.

As you might expect, the movie, which was made originally as a British TV program, went nowhere in Britain. Renamed The Last Executioner for the American market and released briefly in a handful of theaters, it tanked even faster. It's a well-crafted movie, but often grim and polemical. The performances of Spall, in particular, and Stevenson just about redeem any failings. The two are excellent. To enjoy just how fine and versatile an actor Timothy Spall is, watch him in costume as the Mikado in Topsy-Turvy, as a photo archivist in Shooting the Past and as the noxious beadle in Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. For Juliet Stevenson, a couple of her finest performances, I think, are as Nina in Truly Madly Deeply and as the wronged Flora Matlock in The Politician's Wife.

I thought this was an extraordinary film. I have to say that when the English do films well, they do them really well. This is the story of Albert Pierrepoint who was not the last hangman in England, but who wants to quibble. His precision and his matter of fact approach to the art (he makes it seem like and art) of killing people as quickly and as painlessly as possible is fascinating. His way of approaching his victim is well choreographed and is very understandable. Out standing performances by Timothy Spall and the rest of the cast. Being English of course they are for the most part unknown to the film world outside England but they all give great performances. This is to be watched again and again. A real keeper

The title of this film is a little misleading as Albert Pierrepoint was not Britain's last hangman. He was however Britain's most famous hangman following in the footsteps of both his father and his uncle. What might suprise Americans is the speed of British executions. Having watched death house scenes in many American movies we are used to the process of execution taking minutes as the condemed walk to the chair or gas chamber, they are the strapped in and asked for any last words. The process taking quite a time and must be nerve racking for all concerned. British executions as shown in this film take only seconds from Pierrrepoint entering the death cell to the condemed man being dead. This film shows one execution taking only seven seconds. As a Brit I may be biased, but it does appear to me that we carried out executions with more humanity than our US cousins.

This film portrays Pierrepoint as the total professional, not even interested in what the condemed has done only in their height, weight and physical condition. A man who takes pride in the speed of his work and not hurting those about to die. A man who carries out his work with humanity without becoming a monster. Such was Pierrepoint's standing in the prison service, though not with the public as his idendity was kept secret, that he was choosen by Field Marshal Montgommery to execute German war criminals following World War II. It is this that brings Pierrepoint to the public's attention and he is hailed as a hero by the British people.

Timothy Spall is in great form as Albert Pierrepoint an ordinary man with an extraordinary job, although it was never a full time occupation. Juliet Stevenson is also first rate as his wife. Spall shows how doubt slowly enters Pierrepoint's mind. At first he is convinced he is carrying an important task. He does however say it is not him killing the condemed, that is the judge and jury. Slowly he comes to hate his role and uses an quarrel over expenses as an excuse to resign as a hangman. We also see how the British public's attitude to the deth penalty changed in the fifties and sixties, Pierrepoint once the hero being called a murderer. Although it is doubtful that a majority of the British people ever opposed hanging.

The film ends with Pierrepoint's famous quote about the death penalty acceiving nothing but vengance. This however does not mean that Pierrepoint was opposed to the death penalty some authorites claiming that he supported it to the day he died.

All in all a good film about an unusal subject.

I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of Pierrepoint at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005. This true story, originaly produced for broadcast on the BBC, tackles its subject matter with simplicity and a suprisingly open minded look at the death penalty.

I went into this one fresh and came out completely impressed by all invovled in this great biopic. High recommended.

The Last Hangman, also entitled Pierrepoint, concerns the life and works of twentieth-century Britain's most prolific and efficient hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, good-natured grocer (and later publican) by day, in his off hours the executioner of over six-hundred people in twenty years: including scores of Nazis condemned at Nuremberg. The film is a bit grim--considering its topic it can't exactly be about sunshine and butterflies, can it?---but it is well-acted, tactfully shot, and certainly pulls few punches in depicting what a hanging is all about. Timothy Spall (Doctor Polidori in Gothic and more recently Scabbers in the Harry Potter series) takes on the title role and lends professionalism and human complexity to a difficult performance. This isn't a feel good flick but for those with a taste for psychological exploration, history, and the challenging topic of capital punishment (which Pierrepoint himself concluded was about nothing so much as revenge) this quietly disturbing British import is a sleeper worth looking into.

Between 1933 and 1955, Albert Pierrepoint was the executioner in the service of government of England. In that period of service, he has hanged over 600 individuals. I was curious to watch this movie in order to find out what it takes to become a second generation executioner (Albert's father was also a hangman)? What goes through a mind of a person performing this task? How do family members handle such choice of profession? Could such horrific job bring some value to humanity and dignity to the ones being executed? Albert seemed to believe that people he hanged have paid for their sins and deserved proper burial last expressions of dignity. He has devoted his life in perfecting the hanging process so that death in instantenous and painless. He treated everyone the same - even the condemned German officers after WWII trials that were executed for their war crimes. An amazing character study of a man who has a loyal husband, dutiful son, a devoted friend and consummate professional in his trade. A man who after 22 year long career as an executioner admitted that he did not believe in capital punishment after all...