The Two-Headed Spy

1958
Approved
1h 33m

IMDb RATING

YOUR RATING

Jack Hawkins in The Two-Headed Spy (1958)

A long-entrenched British agent planted in the German Army is urged to continue his work during the Second World War, but struggles to keep secret his true identity from the Third Reich.A long-entrenched British agent planted in the German Army is urged to continue his work during the Second World War, but struggles to keep secret his true identity from the Third Reich.A long-entrenched British agent planted in the German Army is urged to continue his work during the Second World War, but struggles to keep secret his true identity from the Third Reich.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.9/10

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

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Storyline

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Did you know

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Trivia
Colonel Alex Scotland did serve with the German Army between 1903 and 1907. However during the Second World War he was in charge of the London centre for the interrogation of prisoners of war.

Goofs
Use of reel to reel tape recorder. Whilst Americans may believe tape recording was a post-war development, it is a fact that Germany had built and developed practical tape recorders in the 1940's. They were used in both military and broadcasting situations. After the war, the Ampex corporation was given the German technology as a reward for their war work and they began to manufacture tape recorders in the US. The Ampex model 300 was a very close copy of the German production unit. Some industry journals even suggested that Ampex sold existing units seized from German warehouses before they began manufacture. However, the unit shown in the film is not an Ampex 300 and it is unlikely that German tape would be mounted on plastic reels as shown.

Crazy credits
The credits read inspired by A.P. Scotland's "The London Cage". But in Scotland's own words "I had been a German officer... but that was from 1903 to 1907 during the Hottentot Wars in South Africa. True, also, I had secretly worked and successfully fooled the Germans and worked behind their lines... but that was alongside the Kaiser's Army in 1916." In WW1 & WW2 Scotland served as an intelligence officer interrogating captured German POW's. This culminated in his interrogating suspected war criminals at the end of the war.

Soundtracks
Ich Liebe Dich
Written by Peter Hart

User reviews21

Review

Featured review

8/10

Infiltrating the heart of evil

First of all, thanks to DavidGPS of GB for rectifying what we already knew - that Germany pioneered magnetic tape in the late 1930s. Now lets get to this little-known Jack Hawkins film. Andre DeToth made some excellent movies in his time, but this true story was as gritty as it got in 1958. There are some very hard to stomach scenes of a tyrannical and evil police state at war - not for the squeamish or children, by any means. Among the greatest of WWII movies, Hawkins depicts General Schottland, a British native of German decent who came back to the Fatherland during WW1 and fought in the German ranks. As a result, he was able to infiltrate the German High Command and even became trusted by Hitler. As he became a valued and important source of information to the British, he also endangered himself and all those who helped him. There were some really great WWII movies, but this one has you on the edge of your seat and riveted to the screen for the entire duration. Definitely my favorite Jack Hawkins movie of all time, and hats off to DeToth for daring to be so bold as to show how ruthless the Nazis really were.