This lurid wartime potboiler offered Douglas Sirk's Hollywood debut. Hitler's Madman (1943) dramatized a real Nazi atrocity months after it occurred; produced by minor studio PRC, it so impressed Louis B. Mayer that MGM bought the movie's distribution rights, launching Sirk's American career. It's memorable mainly for John Carradine's irredeemable villain.Reinhard Heydrich (John Carradine) rules over occupied Czechoslovakia with an iron fist. Partisan Karel Vavra (Alan Curtis) parachutes into the country hoping to organize resistance, only to find nationalists divided over tactics or grudgingly acquiescing. It takes an escalating series of atrocities to spur the Czechs to action; when they finally kill Heydrich, SS chief Heinrich Himmler (Howard Freeman) decides to liquidate the village of Lidice in reprisal.
Shot in a little over a week (with reshoots at MGM's request), Hitler's Madman doesn't escape its programmer roots. Most of the film occurs in the same handful of sets, save a few outdoor scenes later in the movie. The movie's real punch comes in its violence, certainly harrowing for its time. Heydrich's entourage interrupts a church service and executes a priest; his men also kill a Czech woman who refuses to serve as a concubine. Madman climaxes in its strikingly shot massacre, with villagers defiantly singing a nationalist hymn as the SS guns them down.
Such violence bespeaks Madman's stridency. Besides painting the Nazis as inhuman monsters (predictable but fair), its moral dilemmas prove relatively basic. One Czech fighter (Ralph Morgan) announces that despite his reservations about Earth's complexity, things are indeed black-and-white. Even Czech collaborators like Mayor Bauer (Ludwig Stossel) prove fair game for SS atrocities. The film ends in a powerful montage of slain characters reciting Edna St. Mullay's poem on Lidice, encouraging us to avenge the righteous victims.
John Carradine proves perfect casting for Heydrich. One of Hollywood's great stock villains, Carradine opts for surprisingly subtlety; he makes Heydrich casually cruel and domineering, yet gives him a grim sense of humor (and in his death throes, piteous selfishness) that make him compelling. The other cast members are relatively weak; nominal hero Alan Curtis is a bore, while top-billed Patricia Morison mostly frets and complains. There are fair supporting turns from Ralph Morgan, Edgar Kennedy and Ludwig Stossel; Ava Gardner has a small bit.
Hitler's Madman makes an interesting contrast with Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! No less strident in its antifascist rhetoric, Lang's movie nonetheless wheedles an uplifting victory out of its nightmare scenario. Madman is content to end with an atrocity, a bold choice that surely outraged wartime viewers. It still gives the film a kick that redeems many of its rougher patches.
