This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Fake Identities", which isn't too difficult, considering how many con artists use fake identities. I decided to select three movies that I blogged about recently, so as it turns out not all of my selections are cons faking their identity:
Sneakers (1992). Robert Redford plays a man who hacked into early mainframes back in his college days circa-1970, but never got caught. Now working in security analysis under a false name, the FBI find him and offer to clear his name if he'll help retrieve a chip that can break all currently-known encryption. Among the identity faking is Redford's ex-girlfriend trying to get the voice of one Werner Brandes (his voice is his passport).
Cast a Dark Shadow (1955). Dirk Bogarde kills his first wife but because he misunderstood that she was going to write him into her new will, not out of it, he doesn't inherit her wealth. So he meets a wealthy widow (Margaret Lockwood) and plans to kill her, but she's no dummy. Also no dummy is another woman (Kay Walsh) who shows up and whom Bogarde starts wooing because the marriage to Lockwood is loveless. One of them is faking their identity, but I won't give away which one and why.
The Catcher Was a Spy (2018). Based on the true story of Moe Berg (Paul Rudd), a former backup catcher in Major League Baseball who was extremely intelligent, having gone to Princeton and speaking multiple languages. When World War II comes, his abilities are put to use by the OSS, forerunner to the CIA, and he gets put on the mission to meet German physicist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) and find out if the Nazis are really going to be able to get the atomic bomb. This mission is going to require Berg to use a false identity. The movie isn't bad but not quite as good as it might have been.
4 comments:
I really liked Cast a Dark Shadow, Dirk and company make it very entertaining.
I haven't seen Sneakers in years but it was an enjoyable thriller with an astonishingly high grade cast for such a simple mystery.
It has a good cast but I found The Catcher Was a Spy pretty dull.
I'm a little surprised I think this is the first week where all of my picks are older than all of yours!
This Side of the Law (1950)-Picked up on a vagrancy charge wanderer David Cummins (Kent Smith) is bailed out by lawyer Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas) because he bears a remarkable resemblance to multi-millionaire Malcolm Taylor. As it happens Taylor is about to be declared dead after having gone missing seven years hence, if David will assume Taylor’s identity and convince his estranged family-wife Evelyn (Viveca Lindfors), brother Calder (John Alvin) and sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige)-that he is truly the missing man Cagle will pay him five thousand dollars. What seems like easy money quickly spirals into a web of deception and murder.
The Man Who Never Was (1956)-During WWII as Britain mobilizes to invade Sicily, intelligence agent Ewen Montagu (Clifton Webb) conceives a diversionary scheme to lead Germany to believe the true target is Greece. Creating the false identity of Major William Martin for a young man with no family who recently died of pneumonia (giving the appearance of drowning) Montagu plants phony top secret documents on the body and arranges for it to wash ashore in Spain. While Hitler believes the information German undercover agent Patrick O’Reilly (Stephen Boyd) is skeptical. His suspicions risk exposing the deception.
The Great Imposter (1961)-Young Ferdinand Demara Jr. (Tony Curtis) quits high school to join the Army with hopes of becoming an officer but finds his lack of education stands in his way. His solution is to fake papers as an officer in the Marines but eventually his lie is detected. On the run he assumes the identity of a Trappist monk. In time though he again must flee and as the years pass Demara impersonates a sailor, prison warden, teacher and doctor as his journeys take him around the globe. This is based on a true story.
Leave it to you to pick 3 films that I have not seen yet but always wanted to.
I'm so glad you picked The Man Who Never Was, Joel. It's a really good movie based on a true story, as I'm sure you know. Webb was technically way too old to play Montagu, but still does a fine job. I like to think of the movie as CSI in reverse.
I also didn't like The Catcher Was a Spy as much as I wanted to. I had first heard about Moe Berg many, many years ago when I heard an interview with the author of the book on the old David Brudnoy radio show out of Boston. (Brudnoy died in 2004, which is a sign of how long ago I heard the interview.) I knew there had been attempts to get a movie made, but it didn't get done until a few years back.
The Catcher Was a Spy sounds super interesting, I need to check that one out! :-D
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