Great performances, especially from Timothy Spall, and delightfully not one terrible supporting role. Entirely believable all along. I wasn't even too disappointed in the one dream sequence.. Well filmed and each individual scene well edited, but... the entire film gets lost in the flaw of the typical biopic: too wide ranging. Trying to cover too much of the original topic, the story ends up a series of vignettes, hamhandedly points out key moments in history, gets unfocused and it had to go out of it's way to explicitly bring up the point they were getting to. There were some great stories in here, and I have to believe they could have narrowed it to just, say, the moral conflict that emerges after the Tish "job."

I likes me a good British film. And this is one. A good script, coupled with an interesting story on a confronting subject, throw in some excellent characters and performances, you have this gem. Timothy Spall is Albert Pierrepoint. We journey with him from his induction as hangman, to the man who holds the speed record for a hanging, to having to hang the man who was once his best friend. Spall plays the role with beautifully understated resolve and resignation.The direction is exquisite, cinematography top class. Watching one hanging after another, hearing their crimes, watching their last steps, last words, men and women, the guilty and the still pleading innocence. There's much more to the story, but it's our anticipation as each hanging approaches, our brief sighting of and introduction to the victim, that keeps this film peaking throughout. Martin Phipps score is the cherry on this unforgettable cake.

Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew from Harry Potter), Eddie Marsan, and Juliet Stevenson star in a film about a man (Spall) who follows in his father's footsteps to become the best hangman in England.What strikes you first is the detachment with which he does his job. He does not become personally involved, just do it quick and professional.Outside the job, he is a grocer, and a character that would never be connected with being a hangman: he sings and dances, and enjoys comedies.After he was chosen to execute 47 German prisoners of war, he changed. His identity became known, and he became the target of those who wished to abolish the death penalty.His calm composure starts to unravel little by little.His last two shown were the tipping point.Spall was outstanding in this film, and had great support from Marsan and Stevenson. It was an intelligent and captivating drama.

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.