Review of Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman (2005) by Jean-Francois V — 25 Oct 2010

Albert Pierrepoint was a XXth century hangman who is said to have hanged 608 people, including 200 Nazi war criminals and several women. The film covers about thirty years of his life, though the main actor (Timothy Spall, the photographer from "Shooting the Past") does not age, and one does not really get a real feeling of the flow of time, unless one pays close attention to clothes, especially in the few newsreels that are integrated into some of the scenes.

The subject is rather bleak, and the film is very slow, but one execution did make me cry, and the whole experience left me with the feeling of sharing some of Pierrepoint's guilt or at least his "impurity" for having hanged so many people. There is an immediacy to some of the death scenes that makes you feel you are both victim and executioner, and have actually been through the process on both sides.

The issue of the death penalty has not been one that has troubled me much. To be honest, I am more concerned about the mass murder of civilians in war or animals in the food industry, i.e. with the suffering and death of the innocent. My main problem with the death penalty is that occasionally, innocent people do get killed (some such people are shown in the film, like Timothy John Evans, who was falsely accused of murdering his daughter, while his necrophiliac landlord did it, but being unfamiliar with any of them, the whole thing escaped my attention until I did some additional reading.) But what the film made me realise was what it felt like to be the man who actually performed the deed with his own hands, or the woman he touches with those same hands.