Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman (1943)

I had shot the film almost like a documentary, since this seemed the style best suited to the theme, and given the very limited shooting time.

---Douglas Sirk

Hitler’s Madman was émigré Douglas Sirk’s first film in America, after a successful career in Germany.  It was shot in a week for PRC, a Poverty-Row studio, and then bought by MGM; it came out at the same time (1943) that Fritz Lang’s film Hangman Also Die was released.  Both films tell a version of the same story:  the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German in charge of the occupation of Czechoslovakia.  It is an unusual opportunity to compare two superb directors dealing with the same story:  Sirk had only a week to make his film and shot it like a claustrophobic newsreel, isolating the town of Lidice as the Germans destroyed it.  Lang focused more on the assassin and shot his film like a film noir, emphasizing the role of fate.

One thing Sirk’s films have common with the films of other great directors is the ability to bring characters vividly to life, no matter how small the role.  In Hitler’s Madman Sirk used an extraordinary cast of supporting actors –Victor Kilian, Ralph Morgan, Edgar Kennedy, Jimmy Conlon, Patricia Morison, et al.-- to portray the villagers and their families.  He also, with his cinematographer Eugan Shuftan, created a town and the farms surrounding it with expressionistic lighting and intelligent camera angles.  Sirk’s powerful film causes one to reflect on what role we have in society, especially when things seem to be going wrong:  how does fascism succeed and how is it able to survive?  Frank Spotnitz’s intense alternate-history film on Amazon, The Man in the High Castle, raises many of the same questions; based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel, it shows the Axis winning WWII and occupying America.

And I also wanted to mention two novels that deal with possible fascism in America:  Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here(1935) and Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America(2004)