MOVIE REVIEW: 'Pierrepointe'


From the Friday, July 13 Oregonian ....



Albert Pierrepoint was the Michael Jordan of the noose. Between 1932 and 1956, he worked as one of Britain's Official Executioners - - just as his father and uncle had before him -- hanging hundreds of condemned men and women with record-breaking speed and efficiency. He was a meticulous craftsman, famous in Old Blighty for pulling the trap-door lever on Nazi war criminal Josef Kramer, "The Beast of Belsen." He once got a man from his holding cell to the noose-drop in just over seven seconds.

And then, after his retirement, in his 1974 autobiography Executioner: Pierrepoint, the greatest hangman who ever lived revealed enormously complicated feelings about his craft -- concluding in print that "executions solve nothing…. I do not now believe that I prevented a single murder."

The movie "Pierrepoint" (also released here under the title "The Last Hangman") dramatizes and occasionally over-dramatizes Albert's 24-year career. For a while, it's a study of a decent man who puts his life into compartments so he can do terrible deeds.

Timothy Spall plays the hangman, and it's a fair-minded, human portrayal. His Pierrepoint is principled and focused on the job at hand. He speaks of his work to no one, not even his wife (Juliet Stevenson). His fellow hangmen get lost in life-and-death philosophizing while he's working out proper rope lengths in his head.
After one of dozens of onscreen executions, as he's prepping a woman's corpse for burial, he muses, "It's not really taking a life, is it? The government wants these people executed, not you or me." After one quick-and-clean neck-break, he says, "We don’t hurt them. Instant -- a professional job, well-done."

But separating work and life and emotion becomes impossible after Nuremberg, when Pierrepoint becomes so famous for executing Nazis, the men he's hanging address him by name.

And it's here, sadly, that the movie becomes a lot less emotionally sophisticated. And a lot less interesting. Because Spall and director Adrian Shergold seem to think the best way to show Pierrepoint struggling with his feelings about capital punishment is to have him hit the bottle, stare into space and yell theatrically at his shell-shocked wife while bursting into tears. It's terribly stagy, and it betrays the complex psychology built up over the previous hour.
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C-plus; 90 minutes; rated R for disturbing images, nudity and brief sexuality.

'Pierrepoint' (The Oregonian, July 13, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - July 13, 2007 at 03:00 PM        

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