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Pierrepoint [2006] | ![Pierrepoint [2006]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XE%2BklVxTL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Adrian Shergold
Actors: Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Eddie Marsan, Simon Armstrong, Ann Bell
Studio: Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd
Category: DVD
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £4.94
You Save: £15.05 (75%)
New (10) Used (5) from £3.92
Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 2526
Format: Anamorphic, Pal
Languages: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired), English (Subtitled), English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region: 2
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 90 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5060052410887
ASIN: B000GJ0NTS
Theatrical Release Date: 2005
Release Date: September 10, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 Mixed feelings October 28, 2008
Jamie Sleeman (Hampshire, England)
I've long been interested in the history of capital punishment in this country and could hardly fail to know the name of Albert Pierrepoint. It was therefore inevitable that I was going to see this film sooner or later.
I write this review as someone who is opposed to capital punishment and in favour of life imprisonment. That may come as some surprise to readers, given some of the criticisms I'm going to level at this film.
I think this film is, very watchable and deeply fascinating. The problem I have with it is that it features real people and real events and in its race to convey an anti-capital punishment it twists facts and real events into what is sometimes a barely recognisable facsimile. Here are some of my big beefs...
1/ According to eyewitness testimony, Timothy Evans did not say a word as he was lead to the gallows, let alone make a desperate plea that fell on Albert Pierrepoint's deaf ears.
2/ Albert Pierrepoint was a sharp, coherent and articulate man, not the almost simpleton he's depicted as being by Timothy Spall.
3/ There is no evidence of Pierrepoint being hungry for the number one spot and desperate the get the fastest ever execution, as he is depicted doing in the film. The occasion of the seven second hanging was mostly caused by the prisoner being desperate to get the ordeal over with and almost beating Pierrepoint into the execution chamber in his haste to reach the trapdoor. The autobiography of one of Pierrepoint's most prolific assistants, Syd Dernley, tells of how Pierrepoint had to break into a trot to overtake the condemned man. That is not to say Pierrepoint wasn't one of the fastest and most efficient hangmen in history, because he was.
4/ The film's biggest emotional moment comes when Pierrepoint breaks down in the bar of his pub after hanging one of his best friends, Tish, after belatedly discovering he was due to hang him after arriving at a prison. It shows him losing faith in his remoteness and turning against capital punishment, partly because of how bad this event made him feel.
In reality the two men were closer to being casual acquaintances than they were best friends, as the most they had done was sing the odd duet together in Pierrepoint's pub.
5/ Pierrepoint is shown being disappointed when learning that he is going to be "only assisting" during his first appointment. In reality it was an accepted fact in hanging circles that you would be an assistant executioner for some years after training, and that you would act as a number two many times during that period. Pierrepoint himself gave evidence to a government commission that he had been an assistant on around forty occasions before acting as the number one for the first time. Ironically the situation with the number one handing over the duties to Pierrepoint really did happen, although not to the degree shown in the film, and it was the man that Pierrepoint originally trained with. This incident happened several years later however and that man had also performed as an assistant during many executions. It was unheard of during this period for a man to act as the number one in his first execution.
6/ Anne Pierrepoint is shown as being a money-driven scrooge. She may have been, but there is no public evidence to suggest so. The remark about selling on drinks bought by customers for Pierrepoint was in fact made by Pierrepoint himself to Syd Dernley.
So it's a fascinating film to watch, but it's got some grave disservices to history in it, driven I assume by the makers anti-capital punishment agenda.
7/ The rear of the DVD case incorrectly states that Pierrepoint hanged the Nuremberg war criminals after the second world war. Those executions were actually carried out by an NCO of the United States Army, not Albert Pierrepoint. Pierrepoint did hang around 200 war criminals, but the Nuremberg ones weren't among them.
 Grim, interesting, quietly polemical, and with two magnificent performances by Timothy Spall and Juliet Stevenson October 18, 2008
C. O. DeRiemer (San Antonio, Texas, USA)
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.
No Hanging Around The Bar September 17, 2008
ianrmillard
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
No Hanging Around The Bar was a notice said to have been on the counter of Pierrepoint's pub (the Help The Poor Struggler) though he himself always denied it. It seems to denote a levity about his second string income-source which in most respects he discouraged. This film is, I think, a fairly good psychological portrayal of the famous executioner, based mainly on his own book Executioner: Pierrepoint, which has been reprinted or re-issued not long ago. Although the actor playing Pierrepoint was larger bodily than the hangman, I felt he got the mindset very well.
I should say that this was a very good film to watch, never boring and in parts quite sombrely affecting. The book is worth reading too, as is the similar memoir by another hangman, Sid Dernley.
Chilling But Compelling September 3, 2008
Northern Warrior (Swindon, England)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Let me state at the outset I am a supporter of Capital Punishment for the most heinous crimes and, having watched Pierrepoint, that view has not changed. However this review is of the film biographry of Britain's most famous hangman not a debate as to the rights and wrongs.
The film appears to reference both Albert's own autobiography and that written by Syd Dernley - an assistant hangman who worked with him on many occasions.
Overall the story is told quite well, though Timothy Spall doesn't quite look like Albert and doesn't really age during the course of the film. The 1930's - 1950's atmosphere of the UK is very well captured, from the "corner shop" economy, to the dimly lit houses and pubs with no mod-cons, everyone smoking etc.
The prisons are chillingly recreated in particular the condemned cell and the execution chamber. So many films purporting to show the British system get it wrong but everything, from the design of the scaffold and drop to the "proper" noose and rigging show this aspect was quite well researched. For the most part the story is told quite factually though there are a number of deviations from the impression given by the two books.
*There is no evidence to support the events depicted on Albert's first engagement as assistance, when Sid Collins refused to do the job and he had to take over. The book describes how he had to work out the drop, but Collins still carried out the execution.
* Pierrepoint was described as "greased lightning" on a job. He did not linger to look in the eyes of the prisoner or wait to see if they would speak. The average time from entering the condemned cell to springing the drop was 8 - 12 seconds.
* The "whiteout" about the salad did not occur at the Corbbit execution but the double hanging of Gower and Redel. While he admits to being effected by the "Tish and Tosh" hanging this seems to have been over-played in the movie - after all, he carried on as executioner for some years after. There also seems to be no evidence to support his breakdown at the pub after the execution or indeed that his wife drove him to carry on with the job.
*According to the books, Timothy Evans never spoke at his execution.
* According to the official memoirs, there was indeed no coffin for the thirteeth Nazi but there was no fuss made and the body was buried as is.
There was possibly more emotion on display than actually the case - the impression from the books is that Albert was a pretty cool character who was (at the time) quite comfortable with what he was doing. Don't forget, people thought quite differently back then. Other than dealing with the Nazis, there were actually only around 9 or 10 criminal executions a year post war in the UK. Most of those were "domestic" killings not the wholesale slaughter of organised criminals.
So yes, quite a few historical errors but technically very factual and very fascinating viewing.
 Utterly absorbing, pretty much faultless movie making August 29, 2008
Stephen B. Peddie (Surrey, UK)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In cinema, the difference between observation and participation remains the difference between the very, very good and the truly exceptional. This film is, without question, truly exceptional.
Ordinarily, it would not be necessary to add much beyond that statement, but in this case it might be worthwhile considering the subject matter.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be present at a hanging? Well this film will put you in that room, right there in the middle of the participants, before, during and after - and repeatedly. If you're not comfortable with that idea, you might want to look for a lesser film or a brighter subject. That would be a pity though, Pierrepoint is utterly absorbing, pretty much faultless movie making.
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