Hitler's Madman (1943)

Interesting facts

Hitler's Madman is a 1943 World War II drama directed by Douglas Sirk. It is a fictionalized account of the 1942 assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich and the resulting Lidice massacre, which the Germans committed as revenge. The film stars Patricia Morison and Alan Curtis and features John Carradine as Reinhard Heydrich. The screenplay was written by Peretz Hirschbein, Melvin Levy, and Doris Malloy, from a story by Bart Lytton, with some uncredited contributions by Edgar G. Ulmer.

Production

The film was produced independently by Seymour Nebenzal under the auspices of the Producers Releasing Corporation, a "Poverty Row" studio, and filmed in one week in November 1942, under the title of Hitler's Hangman. The title was changed to Hitler's Madman to avoid confusion with Fritz Lang's similarly themed Hangmen Also Die!.

Sirk hired German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan to shoot the film, but because Schüfftan was not allowed to work in the United States at the time, the cinematography credit was given to Jack Greenhalgh and Schüfftan was credited as "Technical Director." The film opens and closes with Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1942 poem, "The Murder of Lidice".

Sirk directed reshoots at MGM's own studios in May 1943, consisting of the inspection of the female university students and Klara's resulting suicide (during which an uncredited Ava Gardner appears), Heydrich's death scenes, and the shooting of the male residents of Lidice.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.