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Topic: Pierrepoint (UK title); The Last Hangman (US title)

Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 05-02-2007 02:19 AM

Warning: plot spoiler:

A biopic of Albert Pierrepoint, the British executioner who became a household name following the media coverage when he hanged the Nuremberg Nazi war criminals in 1946 - until then, executioners had been anonymous and strictly forbidden from discussing their work in public (this much is pretty much uncontroversial fact). The film argues that he then became opposed to capital punishment as the result of having to hang a friend (James Corbitt) who was a regular customer of the pub he owned, after Corbitt was convicted for strangling his lover. There's a bigger element of fiction here, because there is no evidence to suggest that Pierrepoint had more than a passing acquaintance with Corbitt, who was one of hundreds of regulars at the pub. The film closes with Pierrepoint executing Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK and a cause-célèbre for abolitionists, who organised a huge and popular campaign to save her.

Plot spoilers end.

This is a pretty straightforward anti-death penalty film, the only thing that puts it above the average being a very strong performance from Timothy Spall in the lead role. The basic message is that Pierrepoint began his career as an impartial civil servant, following on from his father and uncle, refusing to engage with any moral debates about capital punishment (at Nuremberg, he rebukes an Army officer who expresses satisfaction that the war criminals are going to be executed: 'They're human beings and they have to die - that's all you need to know'), but turns against it as the result of executing someone he had a personal connection to, arguing that the death penalty cannot be a deterrant if the friend of a hangman still went on to commit murder, despite knowing full well what an execution involves.

The film looks like it was made on a moderate budget: most of the scenes take place either in prison cells or Pierrepoint's pub, and there is virtually no location work apart from one or two brief exteriors. It looked to me to have been shot on super 16 (a slightly grainy, washed out look, which suited the 1940s and '50s atmosphere quite well). There was far too much music and it was very intrusive, which to my mind undermined the tension in some of the more dramatic scenes. The costume and make-up department must have had fun trying to make a succession of unknown character actors resemble a load of notorious criminals (none of whom, of course, gets very much screen time!).

OK but not a masterpiece basically sums it up. The underlying script idea is quite clever (enlarging the Corbitt character), Spall gives a convincing performance and the production values are adequate, though not big budget. But if, like one of Pierrepoint's fans in the pub, your idea of justice is to 'String the buggers up ... string all of 'em up!', you might find the slight distortion of facts (we see a large numbers of suspected miscarriage of justice cases being executed, e.g. Ellis and Timothy Evans, but very few of the really nasty pieces of work - even the Nuremberg scenes concentrate on the execution of the women) and strong anti-DP message of this film a bit hard to deal with.

One piece of trivia: Albert Pierrepoint was not, in fact, Britain's last hangman. The death penalty was eventually abolished in Britain seven years after his resignation, though by that point the number of executions had declined to two or three a year.

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