Doppelgangers don’t come any luckier. In this instance the swap is with a married billionaire. Cue you’d think for a romcom, especially if the wife has her own reasons for welcoming a replacement. Except this was made at the height of the espionage boom, so it’s quite a slick thriller, not a laff in sight.
The set-up is pretty good. Billionaire Mark Wainwright (Robert Lansing), emerging drunk from a West German pub, is mistaken by an East German thug for American spy Peter Murphy (Robert Lansing) who he’s chased through a secret passageway under the Berlin Wall. Murphy, wounded and exhausted, is mistakenly assumed by Mark’s chauffeur to be his boss and whisked off to a mansion to recover.
Mark’s wife, Eva (Dana Wynter), while her suspicions are alerted, has good reason not to give the game away. Her real husband, a playboy with no interest in business, was on the verge of signing away her family fortune. When the new Mark refuses to do so, she plays along, intrigued not so much by his job as by the fact that he is the opposite of her husband, kind and considerate.
Complications arise when Eva’s half-brother grows suspicious after his bid to take over the empire is thwarted, and when the East Germans express doubts that Peter was killed, tailing Eva and approaching the fake Mark, and when, as if often the case in these espionage pieces, Peter’s slippery boss Jack (Murray Hamilton) isn’t going to let him disappear quietly when having a billionaire provides the perfect cover for going anywhere in the world on a whim. There’s also the issue of who are the faces on the secret microfilm. And secret police swarming all over the place.
And, of course, of the doppelganger keeping up his disguise. Luckily, the original is a nasty, intemperate character so sudden rudeness can get him out any situation though drinking nine martinis without falling down drunk might be a bigger ask. Plus he’s a man “no government wants to offend.”
So enough complication to keep the movie rolling on, plus, as you might expect, incipient romance. It gets slightly episodic after this, involving helping a dissident escape East Germany and outing a Dutch spy.
While taken with the new Mark, Eva knows a) that his job comes first and b) it involves violence. She doesn’t want to take second place to his job and ain’t keen on shooting and fisticuffs.
But it takes a surprise turn in the third act when Jack instructs his agent to kill a 16-year-old boy who’s being blackmailed into revealing American spies. Rather than do that, the agent tries to go down a different route.
Robert Lansing is a new name to me, but then I’ve not seen Namu, the Killer Whale (1966). He’s got a brooding intensity that didn’t get him as far up the Hollywood ladder as you’d have thought. Dana Wynter I knew from Sink the Bismarck! (1960) but her movie roles had been scant.
Directed by John Newland (The Spy with My Face, 1965). Like The Man from Uncle features, this turns out to have been culled from a series, The Man Who Never Was, released in the US for television and abroad into cinemas.
Entertaining. While it might have been more entertaining as a rom com, it certainly works well enough for a thriller.
You can catch this on YouTube and minus the annoying ads.
The Magnificent 60s 