Watch Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This film is about the career of Albert Pierrepoint, one of Britain's last executioners; progressing from gloomy, umber anonymity in the '40s, through unwelcomed celebrity as the Allies' hand of justice at the Belsen war-crimes trials, to uneasy focus of some anti-capital-punishment vitriol in the late '50s. However, hanging is not the subject of this play, it is the gruesome backdrop against which the main characters struggle with the conflicts of conscience, duty, social propriety and making a living in hard times. Timothy Spall, who does not have a great dramatic range (unlike Juliette Stevenson who plays his wife), manages to make his vexatious guinea-pig expression work as that of the ruthlessly mechanical hangman taking pride in the speed with which he can dispatch each miscreant. To begin with, the meticulously-observed, depressingly-confined, scenery of the condemned man's cells, English back parlors and wartime pubs, accompanied by some beautifully lugubrious music, may make you feel that you might soon be in need Albert's merciful services, but this is a superb drama of unexpected depth and, before the end, you will be spun round, marched into a different room and dropped on a noose of pathos.

This film is about the work and family life of Britain's most prolific executioner."The Last Hangman" deals with a grim topic which many people would regard as a taboo. It is not easy to make it a good film out of it. Fortunately, "The Last Hangman" has a particularly effective plot that details the psychological change of Pierrepoint as his career progresses. Timothy Spall acts very well, as he delivers a range of undoubtedly effective emotions. From pride, doubt to depression, everything shows on his face clearly."The Last Hangman" is a detailed psychological journey of a gruesome occupation. It should not be missed.

Last year, I was flicking through the late-night channels when I came across a British TV movie called 'Mr Harvey Lights a Candle (2005).' I only caught the final half-hour or so, but something about the leading man, Timothy Spall, struck me as astonishingly poignant. I'd previously only known him as the groveling Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail in the "Harry Potter" films, a role that hasn't afforded him much dramatic depth. His performance as the titular Mr Harvey was movingly underplayed, suggesting a man keeping painful memories and emotions to himself – in his own quietly-wounded way, he struck me as the modern equivalent of Charles Laughton. Adrian Shergold's 'Pierrepoint (2005)' (originally released under the erroneous title 'The Last Hangman') also utilises this quality of Spall's persona.I was reminded of a 1950s American noir, 'The Thief (1952).' In that film, Ray Milland's Communist spy is kept completely wordless, a verbal manifestation of his internalised guilt and anguish. Albert Pierrepoint suffers in much the same way. In the course of his daily duties as an official government executioner, Pierrepoint witnesses more grief than any ten men, yet he is bound by an unspoken obligation to keep his work and personal lives separate. Guilt, regret and disgust are perpetually broiling at the back of his mind, but he is obligated to conceal his true feelings. Pierrepoint and wife Annie (Juliet Stevenson) live a feeble charade, one that becomes impossible to maintain when his duties as a hangman become public knowledge.There is no crime more condemned in society than to deliberately take a human life. Pierrepoint, in a corruption of typical moral values, is encouraged by the government to do exactly this. Indeed, he takes a grotesque sort of professional pride in his work, carrying out death sentences with a mechanical precision that is later compared to the inner workings of the Nazi death-camps – men and women are executed in time for hangman to return to his smouldering cigar. In Germany, Pierrepoint performed as many as a dozen hangings a day, and Shergold's camera spins around the gallows in a disturbingly artistic "ballet' of executions (contrasting Pierrepoints own purely-mechanical approach with his glorification by the popular British media). A well-made, but emotionally exhausting biopic.

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.