The Magic Face

Luther Adler is a Viennese actor who imitates the leaders of the day: Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, he does them all and the audiences roar. Then comes Anschluss and his wife, Patricia Knight walks out on him for, eventually, Hitler. So Adler learns to be a valet, becomes Hitler's valet and replaces him. Unfortunately, he can't just destroy the Third Reich, so he adopts a strategy of making bad decisions: declaring war on Russia instead of invading England and mopping up that front first; delaying the response to the Normandy landing and so forth, up to the Bunker and his disappearance. Plus there's William L. Shirer, speaking before and after about how this story was told to him and he sort of believes it.

I respected Shirer's writing until today. I hope they paid him a lot of money for spouting this nonsense, which is suitable fare for a PRC programmer nine years earlier. To see Frank Tuttle listed as director is astonishing. He had spent many years as a house director for Goldwyn and Paramount, making excellent thrillers. Now, however, he was working for Columbia, so the support network was not something he could manage. Good actors, wasted!

The worst part of it is this is largely the plot of Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR, released a dozen years earlier, in which a Jewish barber takes the place of Hitler. Aren't you supposed to make the melodrama first and the burlesque after?