Brecht's attempts to carry his ideas into the cinema were no more successful in Hollywood. After his arrival there in 1941, he embarked on some fifty writing projects, most of which proceeded nowhere. After the May 1942 assassination of Heydrich, the Nazi commander of occupied Czechslovakia, and the terrible German reprisals, Brecht and his friend Fritz Lang were inspired to make this fiction film in which Brian Donlevy portrays a member of the Czech underground who assassinates "Hitler's Hangman." The Gestapo's search for him endangers the lives of a whole community held hostage. Although he was an admirer of Lang's, Brecht realized early on the differences that existed between them; for starters Brecht's "epic" style was the antithesis of the psychological or sociological thriller. When he saw that Lang intended to make a conventional film, Brecht tried to save it with an "ideal script" that was also rejected, and the re-write was given to his co-scriptwriter John Wexley to complete. If the finished product is more Lang than Brecht, still a number of compelling, Brecht-inspired touches remain, in particular the theme of the resistance of people in an occupied land that informs the whole film. Hans Eisler's score for this film is a major achievement in film music. (And, although words like "masses," "the people," and "comrades" were excised from the script, Eisler managed to smuggle the music from the highly emblematic "Comintern Song"of 1929 into the finale under the noses of studio moguls who were unaware of its significance.)