Hitler's Madman

The first Hollywood picture of melodrama king Douglas Sirk is a B-movie about the assassination of the Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich, and the savage reprisals which left the Czech village of Lidice razed to the ground. Made a short time after the actual events it depicted, the film has an urgency about it, if little of the director's later finesse. Sirk reputedly met Heydrich in Berlin in the 1920s and remembered his expressive face and Shakespearean style of declaiming - which may explain John Carradine's performance as the Nazi monster. Ava Gardner pops up briefly as one of Lidice's martyred population.