spotting Hitler

Your thread made me think of a movie I saw long, long ago about an actor who kills Hitler (or something) then takes his place to ruin WWII for the Nazis. At the very end, as Berlin is falling, he takes off his disguise and walks away from the bunker. I finally decided to reconnect with this film. A brief search brought me to "The Magic Face" (1951) with Luther Adler as the impressionist who plays the dual role. I have it downloading right now. It seems like a mostly unseen feature with only 65 votes at the database.

The poster for the movie is more than a little lurid.

Nazi spy films are a favorite genre of mine. Hitler makes guest appearances , either as archival footage, or portrayed by an actor, or both. But usually the focus in these films is much smaller players , so Hitler himself is just a fleeting image



some favorites

PIMPERNEL SMITH - Leslie Howard as a classics professor who goes inside Germany to free intellectuals from concentration camps, using wit and disguise. Funny and moving 

MAN HUNT- Walter Pigeon , on a late summer hunting trip in Germany 1939, takes aim  at Hitler , just to see if he could hit him. He is beaten and left for dead but escapes as war is breaking out all around him. He is pursued by George Sanders. Great twisty slice of life on the eve of war . Sanders often shows up as a Nazi agent in these films .

SPITFIRE - Leslie Howard again with David Niven, inventing the plane that fought the  blitz. I found this dull, but I adore Leslie Howard 


ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON- very funny comedy with Cary Grant as a newsman ousting Ginger Rogers as a burlesque player engaged to a German Baron who turns out to be Hitler’s front man for organizing pre invasion sabotage , played by Walter Skezak, who walks the tight rope between real menace and comic villain beautifully. The film manages to address a lot of the actual terror of the Nazi machine while providing a lot of great romantic chemistry .

One of mine, too.

The Hitler Building in Invasion of the Neptune Men (hardly a classic, I know.)