After viewing the movie in class I can say that my opinion of the film is varied. I saw the main characters journey through him putting people to death with a very stoic face, like he did not care what did happen to these people, they were convicted of killing someone and he had to put them to death. He said a lot of the time that he was doing his job and that was it, nothing more nothing less; it was cool to see that way of thinking, how he saw it as a job. Have to give him sometime of applause for not letting it get to him as much. That was the part that I liked about the movie, what I did not like was how he kept in all of the emotions that accompanied the job. I am guess that because of the time that he lived, nobody really thought of how an executioner would react to killing a handful of people let alone 608. So it was a little sad to see him finally crack after he killed his best friend. Again noting to the time period that people did not have big restrictions for the executioner, like executing someone you might know or having periodical evaluations from a psychiatrist to see if you are still fit to do your job. It was cool though to see the relation of what we talked about in class and see it on the big screen (or medium screen); for me it made the connections easier to see and better to remember.
Three new pieces of information that I learned from the movie is that they put a lot of calculation into killing a person. I thought that when you hung someone it was a kind of one size fits all noose. I did not know that you had the take the person’s sex, weight, height, occupation, and a bunch of other different factors into consideration before killing someone. If you messed up they would either droop so far pulling the head off or drop to low and suffocate to death, I don’t know which one is worse, so it must have taken some pretty skilled executioners to hit the sweet spot, that what the main character did time and time again. What I also learned was the no public executions that took place, it was not really surprised as more I thought they still did it given the year it was taking place in, 1935. What did catch my eye was that the execution took place in a small room and none of the victims relatives where there to see it, only prison officials. The last piece of information that I learned from this movie was that the main character, Albert Pierrepoint, was that he participated in the execution of Nazi war criminals, executing 47 different war criminals in one week. It was just interesting to see a man be praised for his job, a job that not a lot of people want to be praised for and a reward for it was going to participate in the killing of more people. It was still cool thought to learn that little bit of history.
Some points that the movie made throughout its run was that Albert Pierrepoint was a very observable and meticulous man. Observable in the way that he could look at a person and the history of who they are and what they did and just know what type of rope and length to use to dispatch them quickly. Also when he was executing the Nazi war criminals he choose the women who spoke out at him when she was being groomed for execution first not because she made him angry but because she would be the most scared and might cause a problem. Meticulous in the way that he treated the executed after they are dead, they need to be clean and prepared properly and be given a proper burial because