Adrian Shergold (2005)
The closing credits inform us that, between 1933 and 1955, when he asked for his name to be removed from the Home Office’s list of executioners, Albert Pierrepoint hanged 608 people. The film’s beginning and end are the start and finish of his career as a hangman: there’s no flashback to a key childhood event nor flash forward to regretful old age – except that the same closing credits remind us that, towards the end of his long life (he died, aged eighty-seven, in 1992), Pierrepoint wrote that he thought capital punishment achieved nothing but revenge. The absence of these biopic clichés might sound like but, since the filmmakers have nothing to put in their place, the self-denial is pointless. Pierrepoint is dramatically denuded, lacking in insight, surprise or exploration of character.
In an early scene, we learn that Pierrepoint, when (in his late twenties) he applies successfully to become a hangman, is following on a family tradition. His uncle tells Albert that his father would have been proud. His mother is dismayed and asks, ‘Why now, Albert? Why start now?’ He replies: ‘It’s just in me. I always knew it would come out one day’. There’s no explanation either here or subsequently what ‘it’ is. This is partly because the occupation is something to be kept quiet: the mother goes on to say, ‘I’ll tell you now what I told your father – don’t bring it over this threshold’. When Albert, whose main work is as a grocery delivery man, marries Annie from the corner shop, he doesn’t tell her or anyone else about his other occupation; once she works out what the job is anyway, she refers to it only in terms of its remuneration and otherwise keeps the silence going. The lack of probing of Pierrepoint’s psychology is also a necessary consequence of his background, one in which people didn’t talk about troubling things going on inside their heads. In this sense too, it is – in theory – to the film’s credit that it eschews conventional mechanisms to explain motive; but the effect is to deprive Pierrepoint of any individuality or dramatic interest. He becomes a generic figure, used to demonstrate that capital punishment is a bad thing and that an executioner may need a pathological degree of detachment to do his work. It’s not clear how well known the Pierrepoint family’s career history is in the local community – or whether it’s therefore credible that no one else draws their own conclusions from Albert’s regular disappearances ‘on business’. (There’s an echo here of the reports you read of wives and mothers who never suspected the significance of absences of the serial killers with whom they shared their lives.)
The point gets further obscured when Albert becomes overnight not just a local but a national celebrity after travelling to Germany in the late 1940s to execute Nazi war criminals. By this stage, the film has become little more than a succession of hangings, each one illustrating Albert’s proficiency and ambition to be Britain’s number one hangman (he keeps trying to break his own record for the time taken to carry out the job). Pierrepoint drifts into predictable career highlights (Timothy Evans and, eventually, an angelic-looking Ruth Ellis). The protagonist’s professionalism not only precludes any hint of compassion on his part for the condemned man or woman. It also means that he draws no moral distinction between a terrified kid in Strangeways and a Beast of Belsen – and that he avoids moral censure of any of his victims. There’s clearly an interesting story here but the screenwriters Jeff Pope and Bob Mills can’t find a way to develop it. The wages of death allow Albert and his mercenary wife to take over a local pub. In the decisive sequence in which Pierrepoint has to execute a friend, the film desperately resorts to the sort of cliché it has tried pointlessly to avoid. (The fact that this too is based on fact doesn’t prevent its being unbelievable in the way it’s presented here.) Albert is shocked and incredulous when he finds this man in the condemned cell. It’s hard enough to believe he didn’t know the man’s real name from the time when we see them as an established double act, doing impressions in their local of the music hall duo Tish and Tosh. It’s incredible – after Tish has had a fight in the Pierrepoints’ pub on account of the the girl-who’s-broken-‘is-‘eart and she has shouted out to a packed bar that she doesn’t want to drink there anyway because the landlord has blood on his hands – that none of the regulars subsequently mentions to Albert or his wife that Tish has been arrested for the murder of this girl. And the film-makers slide away from the implications of the fact that it takes this kind of personal connection to make Pierrepoint see the error of his professional ways.
Timothy Spall gives a performance of considerable skill and integrity as Pierrepoint – a balancing act between sympathy for the character and compliance with the requirements of the hollow, mechanical script. (The writing is so relentlessly obvious that, when Albert arrives in Germany, is given a list of the next day’s executions, reads it and then reveals surprise at how many there are on the list in a subsequent exchange of dialogue, you can almost forgive the script editor, if not the director, for falling asleep on the job.) Spall can’t transcend the limitations of the script but his work is remarkably self-controlled – which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the cast. The overemphatic playing in the smaller parts suggests a director who wants his actors not to inhabit and reveal character but to make points (and usually the same ones). With Juliet Stevenson as Pierrepoint’s wife; Eddie Marsan as Tish; and the reliably convincing Christopher Fulford, as one of Pierrepoint’s fellow entrants to the hangman class of ’33, who doesn’t, however, get beyond his first job.
26 August 2008
