The DuPont Show of the Week (TV Series) The Last Hangman (1963) User Reviews

An Irish veteran of a British army unit responsible for overseeing the execution of some IRA members fifty years earlier fears that he is targeted for revenge.

[aida1200 · 15 February 2006]

I would not call this movie either comedy or musical--unless the inclusion of one song makes a movie a musical and characters speaking in Irish accents make it a comedy. The song, a ballad about the hanging of a group of Irish revolutionaries in the 1910's, merely sets the tone for the drama. Suspense builds as the sergeant in charge of the long-ago hanging (Ed Begley) tries unsuccessfully to draw the attention of his upward-mobile son and daughter-in-law, who are busy getting ready to go out for the evening, to the newspaper story of the death of the next-to-last member of his unit and as the scenes then flash back and forth between the old sergeant, alone in the house but for his teenage granddaughter, and a carload of similarly old Irishmen traveling to the last address on their list. The son's reaction to what he finds on his return home is less comic than ironic, and the overall tone is rather elegiac.