Hitler's Madman

Hitler's Madman is a 1943 World War II film about the assassination of the Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and the Lidice massacre which the Germans committed in revenge for it. The picture was produced by Seymour Nebenzal for PRC[1] and Angelus Pictures, Inc.[2] It starred Patricia Morison and featured John Carradine as Reinhard Heydrich.

Hitler's Madman
Hitler's Madman insert poster.
Directed byDouglas Sirk
Produced bySeymour Nebenzal
Screenplay byPeretz Hirschbein
Melvin Levy
Doris Malloy
Edgar G. Ulmer (uncredited)
Story byAlbrecht Joseph
Emil Ludwig
Based onHangman's Village
1943 novel
by Bart Lytton
StarringPatricia Morison
John Carradine
Alan Curtis
Music byKarl Hajos
CinematographyJack Greenhalgh
Eugen Schüfftan
(uncredited)
Edited byDan Milner
Production
company
PRC
Angelus Pictures
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Distributed byLoew's Inc.
Release date
  • August 27, 1943 (1943-08-27)
Running time
84 minutes
CountryUSA
LanguageEnglish
Alan Curtis and Patricia Morison

The movie's opening credits say that Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1942 poem, Murder of Lidice[3] was the inspiration for this movie and parts of the poem are read at the beginning of the film in order to introduce the audience to the doomed village.[4]

The shooting of Hitler's Madman took place in late 1942 and early 1943.[2] Sirk hired German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan to shoot the film, but since he was not allowed in the United States at the time, the credit for shooting it was given to Jack Greenhalgh.[1]

When the production of Hitler's Madman was finished, MGM's Louis B. Mayer bought the production (reshoots were made in MGM's own studios), making it one of the few, and possibly the first, film to be distributed by MGM even though it was originally produced by another company.[1]

Plot summary

Somewhat fictionalized account of the destruction of the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia and the events leading up to it. In 1942, the Allies parachuted a Czech resistance fighter into the area. He quickly reunites with his former girlfriend and many of the villagers who knew him from before the war. The Nazis are under the command of Reinhard Heydrich who rules the country with an iron fist, arbitrarily arresting innocents and charging them with fictitious crimes. When Heydrich dies from wounds received in a roadside attack, SS chief Heinrich Himmler orders the destruction of Lidice. The men are herded into a church which is set aflame and the women are sent to concentration camps. The town itself is leveled.

Cast

See also

Other films on the same subject:

Notes
  1. Hitler's Madman Archived 2010-11-14 at the Wayback Machine, Turner Classic Movies page
  2. Hitler's Madman, TCM overview page
  3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3193672-the-murder-of-lidice
  4. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036005/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt
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