Ich war Jack Mortimer (1935) Poster

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8/10
Anton Walbrook shines in this excellent mystery as the wrong man who must save him self by becoming the course.
Larry41OnEbay-211 August 2019
Warning: Spoilers
A taxi driver meets a wealthy woman stuck by the side of the road. He helps her with her car and she hires him to be her chauffeur. But first he has to spend one more night as a taxi driver before he can finally move up in the world....

SPOILERS: The jealous star conductor Montemayor knows that his beautiful younger wife, Winifred, is cheating on him with an American named Jack Mortimer. After the concert rehearsal, he takes a taxi to the train station, sees Mortimer and shoots him at an intersection from the backseat of his taxi. The shot is not heard during the traffic noise. The taxi driver, Sponer (Walbrook), sitting in his car with the now-dead Mortimer, goes into a panic. He tells his boss about the incident; but he thinks no one will believe that he is innocent of the murder. So, he places the corpse in a different place and takes the murdered man's luggage to the deceased's wife, Marie Mortimer, and tells her about the incident, too. He comes up with the idea to play the role of Mortimer, so he will not be missed, because some other luggage of his has already been delivered to his hotel in advance. In the hotel room, Winifred Montemayor is looking for Mortimer. She sees that the taxi driver is not Mortimer and suspects him of killing Mortimer. Will the truth save him or will he be executed as a murder or killed by the jealous husband?
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6/10
Thriller
boblipton18 May 2015
Anton Walbrook -- still credited as "Adolph" -- is driving his taxicab for his last shift in Budapest before taking a better-paying job. He picks up a fare at the train station, but when he asks which hotel, he discovers that his passenger has been shot.

This sort of thriller was becoming popular in the movies. Hitchcock's efforts like THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and LADY ON A TRAIN set the standard. This German variation, co-written by Thea von Harbau, is much more gloomy and Teutonic than Hitchcock's saturnine works and the answer to the mystery is clear before it is offered. It's seventy-five minutes of bombastic anger and fear. If that's your taste, you'll enjoy it. Me, I grew up with Hitchcock's works and I prefer his vicious comic relief.

I've seen some of Walbrook's movies shot in in Vienna in the early 1930s. Soon after this, he moved to England, where he worked under the name of Anton -- Adolf wasn't that popular name in Britain starting in 1939 -- where he specialized in kindly, cynical, world-weary Germans and resumed a wider range when he returned to Continental work after the War. He's good here, but it's a role that a lot of actors could have played well.
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10/10
Anton's other side
Equinox2310 May 2009
If anybody would like to hear Anton Walbrook speaking in (his native ?!) Austrian accent I recommend this movie. Here Anton Walbrook very convincingly portrays the Budapest taxi driver Fred Sponer. He is a mischievous,ill-humoured, bad-tempered (granteln), sometimes too simple minded almost stupid member of the lower classes, toiling his day away, having high aspirations but with no hope of changing his situation. This character gets tangled up in a jealousy drama involving the famous conductor Montemayor, his wife and of course Jack Mortimer, who gets murdered on the backseat of Sponer's taxi on his arrival in Budapest. How his simple mindedness gets Fred Sponer ever deeper into a fix is shown in this very delicious movie I highly recommend. The script is very well-done and written by Thea von Harbou. A very deserved ten out of ten from me!!!
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