Look-alike - Film

Film

• Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities (see "Literature," above) has been produced as three film versions between 1911 and 1958, as well as television and stage adaptations.
• Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda (see "Literature", above) has been the basis for many film and stage adaptations, the first film version being in 1913; the best-known film version is John Cromwell's 1937 film.
• Mark Twain's novel The Prince and the Pauper (see "Literature," above) has been the basis for many film and stage adaptations, the earliest film version being in 1920.
• Alexandre Dumas, père's, The Man in the Iron Mask (see "Literature," above) has been adapted into eight film versions between 1929 and 1998.
• The 1932 musical film The Phantom President depicts a man who is eminently qualified to be President of the United States but who is unlikely to be elected because he is dull and lacks charisma. Fortunately, he has an exact double: a patent-medicine salesman and vaudeville hoofer who is a charismatic campaigner but has no actual political qualifications. The film cynically suggests that most American voters would prefer the latter to the former. Both roles are played by legendary song-and-dance man George M. Cohan. Although a weak movie, The Phantom President is historically significant as the only film record of Cohan's song-and-dance performance.
• The 1940 comedy The Great Dictator was Charlie Chaplin's first talkie and his most commercially successful film. Chaplin plays both "Adenoid Hynkel" (a satirized Adolf Hitler) and a Jewish barber who is Hynkel's spitting image. The barber eventually replaces Hynkel, who has been arrested after having been mistaken for the barber. On nation-wide radio the barber, impersonating the dictator, declares an end to anti-semitism and a return to democracy.
• In The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943), by James P. Hogan, Hitler's double (Ludwig Donath) becomes the target of an assassination.
• In The Square Peg (1958) Norman Wisdom plays road repairer Norman Pitkin, who is called up for the army and sent to Nazi-occupied France, and Pitkin's exact double General Schreiber.
• In The Scapegoat (1959), Alec Guinness plays both a French aristocrat and the English schoolteacher who is maneuvered into taking his place so the Frenchman can have an alibi for a murder.
• In the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), French NATO pilot François Derval is murdered by Angelo, a SPECTRE henchman who has been surgically altered to match Derval's appearance. Angelo then takes Derval's place aboard, and seizes, a NATO plane loaded with two atom bombs.
• Pharaoh (1966), directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, is adapted from Bolesław Prus' historical novel Pharaoh (see "Literature", above).
• Love and Death — 1975 Woody Allen satire on 19th-century Russian novels, set during the 1812 French invasion of Russia. A coward, Boris Grushenko (Allen), and his wife Sonja (Diane Keaton) decide to assassinate Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. A double of the Emperor is killed, and Allen's character is executed.
• In The Eagle Has Landed (1976), based on Jack Higgins's novel, German paratroopers attempt in 1943 to abduct Prime Minister Winston Churchill from an English village. It is revealed that it is actually a political decoy who visits the village and is assassinated.
• In Foul Play (1978), starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, the twin of an American archbishop kills the archbishop, impersonates him, and plots to assassinate a fictitious Pope Pius XIII.
• In Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980), the warlord Takeda Shingen (1521–73) is sometimes impersonated by his brother Nobukado. Nobukado saves a thief who is to be executed, because the man bears an astonishing resemblance to Shingen. The thief becomes a kagemusha (shadow warrior) and learns the role of Daimyo Shingen, who is subsequently killed by an enemy sniper. The false identity of the kagemusha is revealed when he is unable to ride Lord Shingen's favorite horse; but in the final battle at Nagashino the kagemusha accepts his role and fights as the last man holding the banner of the Takeda clan.
• In a feature-length episode of the British sitcom, Only Fools and Horses, entitled "Miami Twice," Derek is mistaken for a Mafia don who is his spitting image, and he is used by the Mafia in an attempt to fake the don's assassination (though several tries fail). The likeness is so uncanny that even Derek's brother Rodney is tricked. Both Derek and the don are played by David Jason.
• Paul Mazursky's film Moon over Parador (1988), in which a man who is filming in a fictional country in Latin America called Parador, is forced to play the role of the country's late president, whom he closely resembles.
• Dead Ringers, a 1988 psychological horror film, features Jeremy Irons in the dual role of two identical-twin gynecologists.
• In Roberto Benigni's Johnny Stecchino (1991), the main character is passed off for a snitch hiding from the mob.
• Gary Ross' film Dave (1993), in which an impersonator is hired by the president's Chief of Staff as a temporary decoy.
• In Ringo Lam's Maximum Risk (1996), Jean-Claude Van Damme is a French policeman who discovers that a man who has been killed by the Russian Mafia was his look-alike twin brother that he never knew he had. Tracing the dead brother's footsteps, the protagonist inadvertently "inherits" the brother's predicaments and girlfriend.
• The 2002 film Bubba Ho-Tep starred Bruce Campbell in the role of an elderly Elvis Presley who had traded places with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff (also played by Campbell) and now lives in a nursing home.
• "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking", a 2004 BBC TV film directed by Simon Cellan Jones from an original story by Alan Cubitt, features the sleuth, played by Rupert Everett, tracking down a killer of aristocratic young women. Holmes' suspect seems to have airtight alibis—until the detective deduces that the culprit has a confederate: an identical twin.
• The 2005 film Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith features actor Wayne Pygram, who, in the film, looks remarkably like Peter Cushing. Through stock footage, the film's producers wanted Cushing to reprise his role of Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars. However, the footage was deemed unusable.
• The Prestige (2006), directed by Christopher Nolan, and adapted from the novel by Christopher Priest, in which two rival magicians employ doubles in their astonishing disappearing-reappearing acts.
• The film Goal! 3 is set during the 2006 soccer World Cup and features convincing look-alike doubles including Derek Williams for Sven-Goran Eriksson, Frank Lampard and others who blend the transition from archive footage of the tournament with the fictional action depicted.
• In Vantage Point (2008), a decoy helps protect the president from a possible assassination threat — and is shot. The film claims that "doubles have been used since Reagan."
• In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer is banned from drinking at Moe's tavern. Then a man, who appears to be Homer in a very bad disguise, enters Moe's tavern but is savagely beaten and kicked out. The real Homer then walks up to the unconscious man's body and remarks, "This man is my exact double!"
• The Devil's Double (2011) dramatised Latif Yahia's claims to have been Uday Hussein's double.
• Korean film Masquerade (2012)