gordonl56 HITLER'S MADMAN 1943This Producer's Releasing Corporation production is one of several put out by various studios dealing with the assassination of Nazi bigwig, Reinhard Heydrich.The film is also the first film made in Hollywood by future hit-maker, Douglas Sirk.It is June 1942, and the British parachute several Czech agents into their homeland to stir up trouble. They want the locals to sabotage the massive munitions and armaments factories situated throughout Czechoslovakia. The Czechs had ended up with quite a few heavy industries after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918.Needless to say the Nazi types are not amused with this idea. Hostages are taken and the slightest whisper of dissent brings swift action by the Gestapo. In charge of the country, is the highly efficient, Heydrich. Heydrich is played here with particular glee by a blonde haired John Carradine. A perfect Nazi swine is Carradine , he smiles while signing death warrants , while at the same time he picks out young girls to serve as "comfort" girls for the troops on the Eastern Front.The main leads here are Alan Curtis as the Czech agent, and his girl, Patricia Morrison. Also in the mix are, Edgar Kennedy, Jimmy Conlin and Alan Shean. At first the locals are reluctant to rise up against the Nazi types. That changes after Carradine has the local priest shot, and grabs up several of the village girls.Heydrich is then bushwhacked on a forest road and badly wounded. He lingers on in hospital for several days before dying in agony. The Germans of course retaliate and round up the village women, shoot all the men, then raze the village, (Lidice) to the ground.The story plays fast and loose with the actual facts of the event. But so what, it is meant to be a flag-waver, and as such it works. Most war films produced at the height of the conflict had gobs of anti-Axis propaganda.MGM was so impressed with the film, that they bought the finished product from PRC and released it themselves. Needless to say the film turned a profit.The director, Douglas Sirk, was a German Ex-pat who escaped Germany in 1939 and came to Hollywood. By the 1950's he was turning out big money earners like, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, IMITATION OF LIFE and ALL I DESIRE. He also scored with an earlier series of film noir productions such as, LURED, SLEEP MY LOVE and SHOCKPROOF.Look close and you will see a 21 year old Ava Gardner in an unbilled bit.

RanchoTuVu An interesting movie that does not do much to inspire the viewer through its portrayal of the Czech resistance, though they face a grim ending, but definitely catches the interest in the portrayal of Nazi brutality through the part played by John Carradine as Reich Protector Heydrich, who routinely had people shot in order to maintain a level of fear and control. The characterizations of the townspeople are too quaint for this subject, but they (the townspeople) do catch on as Carradine's brutality increases, with the most memorable scene being when he and his men take over a philosophy class, in a scene that manages to get fairly intense. If it were just up to Alan Curtis to carry the film as Karel Vavra, the film would fall into a dark pit of boredom, since within any resistance movement there is always collaborators within families that need to be killed. Those characters are all left out, and so the drama quotient is not very intense. Nonetheless, Carradine's Heydrich is definitely worth watching.

dbdumonteil Although it was overshadowed by Lang's "Hangmen also die" , "Hitler's madman" seems closer to Borzage's "the mortal storm" ,with its depiction of life in an occupied town.But the finale was probably borrowed from Abel Gance's "J'accuse" (1919 and 1937) and its "wake of the dead" sequences.Great sequences: the professor of philosophy resuming his lecture in front of the Nazis (there is a similar sequence in "the mortal storm");the female student,refusing to be treated as a beast ;the admirable scene where the mayor's wife,reading that her sons are dead, and cursing the "Fuhrer" (a famous lullaby the name of which I cannot remember ,makes a very moving score, as she remembers her boys' childhood).The hangman, in his bed and begging for morphine,as he too realizes that the Third Reich means nothing when you're dying.Probably Sirk's best forties film .In the fifties,he would come back to WW2 and the Nazi barbarity with a work I consider his masterpiece : "A time to love and a time to die" (1958),from the great German pacifist writer Erich Maria Remarque's novel.

FISHCAKE This film story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (titled by the Nazis as Reichs Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, by the Czechs as "The Hangman", and also one of the architects of "The Final Solution")and of the subsequent annihilation of the village of Lidice by the Nazis, really does not do justice to the subject. Although released by MGM, it was actually produced by poverty row Producer Releasing Corporation (PRC). Some of the cast members are old familiars and rather good, but none give a feeling that these are Czechs being murdered by Hitler's minions. As war propaganda, it is a success, and it at least gives the spirit of the tragedy of Lidice, if not historically detailed facts. John Carradine is effective as Heydrich, especially in his deathbed scene.The facts about the assassination briefly are that two Czech partisans were parachuted into Czechoslovakia from an RAF plane. They managed to ambush Heydrich's open Mercedes, throw a bomb under it, and escape to a church. Heydrich died a few days later from complications arising from the penetration of his spleen by bomb fragments and debris from the car upholstery. Using torture, the Nazis discovered the whereabouts of the two partisans and the SS killed them at once. Lidice was picked more or less at random from among villages known to have anti-German leanings. On Hitler's orders, the men were shot and the women and children removed to camps, while the buildings of the site were levelled. When it became known in the allied world, this made excellent anti-Nazi propaganda, and more than one film was made of the subject. It may be that the massive retaliation backfired somewhat on the Nazis also by stiffening Czech resistance to the occupation.