I Was Monty's Double (1958) on Netflix
Months before the Normandy landings, British intelligence wants a decoy. Major Harvey spots an actor, Clifton James, whose impression of General Montgomery might fool the Germans in North Africa.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Months before the D-Day landings, the British government wants the Germans to believe the invasion will fall somewhere other than Normandy. Colonel E.F. Logan and Major Harvey are handed the task and settle on nothing until Harvey watches a London actor, Clifton James, give a convincing impression of General Bernard Montgomery. James, a peacetime actor serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Army Pay Corps, is summoned to London on the pretext of testing for an army film. He doubts he can carry off the impersonation but agrees to try. Dressed as a corporal, he studies the general's mannerisms at headquarters, then, with Harvey posing as his aide-de-camp, sets out for Gibraltar and North Africa.
Cast
- M.E. Clifton Jamesas Himself / General Montgomery
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Was Monty's Double (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The film's kidnapping climax was a fiction: screenwriter Bryan Forbes wrote in his memoir Notes for a Life that the last act, in which Clifton James is kidnapped, was totally fictitious and put in at the insistence of director John Guillermin.SPOILER
According to Clifton James, there was no attempt to kidnap him as the film shows; the German high command did plan to have him killed, but Adolf Hitler vetoed the plan until he could be sure where the landings would actually take place.- The intelligence officer who first recruited Clifton James to impersonate General Montgomery was actor David Niven, who was serving as a lieutenant colonel at the war office.
- When Todon Productions, the company owned by Tony Owen and Donna Reed, bought the film rights in June 1956, it wanted Laurence Olivier to play General Bernard Montgomery, and Fredric March was named as another possibility for the lead.
- Producer Maxwell Setton changed the nationality of Marius Goring's spy character Karl Nielson from Spanish to Swedish so that the unit could film in Gibraltar.
- The film blends real newsreel footage of Bernard Montgomery with Clifton James: the newsreel shows the real Montgomery in many scenes, but James stands in for the real Monty in a few key moments.
- The film inspired a Goon Show episode called "I Was Monty's Treble", named for at least three doppelgängers, and it also inspired the film The Night We Dropped a Clanger.
- Clifton James was barred under army regulations from mentioning his impersonation of General Montgomery; after Operation Copperhead appeared in the book My Three Years with Eisenhower, he got permission to write his own book, published in 1954.
