This curious piece of wartime wish-fulfillment follows Franz Huber, a famed Austrian actor known for his impersonations of celebrities. Captured by the Gestapo, he is ordered to undergo plastic surgery to become a stand-in for Adolf Hitler. It is all part of a plot to poison the troublesome Führer and put the ostensibly more pliable Huber in his place. The anti-Nazi Huber is able to foil the Gestapo and strike a blow for democracy, but his wife (Gale Sondergaard), also a Nazi oppositionist, has no way of knowing that he isn’t Hitler. 1943, U.S., BW, 16mm, 72 minutes.
Gale Sondergaard was born in Litchfield, Minnesota. She was a successful stage actress before she joined her husband, Herbert Biberman, in Hollywood. Winner of the first Oscar awarded for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Anthony Adverse (1936), she was nominated again for her role in Anna and the King of Siam in 1947. After she and Biberman were blacklisted in the late 1940s, she didn’t appear on the screen again until 1969.