I Was Monty's Double

I Was Monty's Double (1958)

The Gigantic Hoax of World War II

The incredible but true story of how an impersonator was recruited to impersonate General Montgomery to mislead the Germans about his intentions before the North Africa campaign.

Date of release
1958-10-21
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (28)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
War, Drama
Director
John Guillermin

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Gibraltar

I Was Monty's Double is a 1958 British film directed by John Guillermin and starring M. E. Clifton James, John Mills and Cecil Parker. The screenplay was by Bryan Forbes adapted from the autobiography of Clifton James, an actor who pretended to be General Bernard Montgomery as a decoy during World War II. It was produced by the Associated British Picture Corporation.

Production

When James agreed to impersonate Montgomery, he was barred from mentioning it under army regulations. However, after Operation Copperhead was mentioned in the book My Three Years with Eisenhower, James asked for and received permission to write a book, which was published in 1954.

In June 1956, it was announced that the film rights had been purchased by Todon Productions, the company owned by Tony Owen and Donna Reed. Todon wanted Laurence Olivier to play Montgomery and Stephen Watts was assigned to write the treatment. Fredric March was named as another possibility for the lead.

Producer Maxwell Setton took the film for Rank, which agreed to finance, but Rank head John Davis wanted Bryan Forbes' script vetted by head of production Earl St. John. Setton then took the project to Robert Clark at the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC), and Clark agreed to finance the film. Setton changed the nationality of Marius Goring's spy character Karl Nielson from Spanish to Swedish to enable the unit to film in Gibraltar.

Forbes wrote in his memoir Notes for a Life that the last act where James was kidnapped was totally fictitious and put in at the insistence of John Guillermin. Forbes wanted to tell a more accurate version of the story, of "an unknown actor who, by sheer chance, was plucked from obscurity and given a few days of total power" then afterwards "was more or less brushed aside....

Newsreel footage shows the real Bernard Montgomery in many scenes, but "for a few key moments, James stands in for the real Monty." In January 1959, ABPC signed a deal with National Telefilm Associates for American distribution of I Was Monty's Double and Ice Cold in Alex in the U.S.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended