Posted on 05/14/2022 8:55:21 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
With any war movie, the safe audience bet typically favors the immediate, graphic horrors of battle. That way, when you see a title such as “Hacksaw Ridge,” you know a director (in that case Mel Gibson) will be operating with a cinematic license to slaughter.
Espionage makes for subtler, trickier storytelling. “Operation Mincemeat,” now purring along, confidently, on Netflix, takes as its subject a singular feat of deception cooked up by British intelligence in 1943. How decisively the operation turned the Allied tide against Nazi Germany is up for historical debate. But the men and women of MI5 assuredly helped make the invasion of Sicily a key Allied military success.
Hitler’s forces were tricked by an eccentric group of plotters, including no less than three current or future spy novelists, among them Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming of future James Bond fame. Using the corpse of an itinerant Welshman, the Jewish barrister turned naval Intelligence officer Ewen Montagu led a team of British military strategists in creating the ruse.
The borrowed corpse? He played the role of a fictional British soldier with a fastidiously detailed back story. The body, in uniform, with letters from his fake sweetheart tucked in a pocket, was strategically plunked into the ocean off the coast of Spain, officially a neutral country at the time.
The corpse washed up on the coast of a fishing village, as planned. The dead soldier’s waterlogged briefcase contained papers indicating an imminent invasion of Greece and Sardinia, even though everyone on all sides of the war expected the Allies to hit Sicily next. Hitler bought the ruse.
Colin Firth plays Montagu; Matthew Macfadyen takes the role of Montagu’s colleague Charles Cholmondeley, a former RAF pilot. In the movie’s framing, the other two key team members were Hester Leggett (Penelope Wilton) and the MI5 clerk Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald). Leslie donated a photo of herself to the cause, “becoming” the dead soldier’s sweetheart.
Screenwriter Michelle Ashford works from the book “Operation Mincemeat” by Ben Macintyre, while carving out a lot of her own narrative for the work and emotional lives of Montagu, Cholmondeley and Leslie. This chaste but tense romantic triangle works roughly 61% of the time. By the book’s account, Montagu was indeed sweet on Leslie. Director John Madden’s film has a lot to juggle, though, and there are times when you think, yes, well, we’d better get back to the mission.
That said: The superb Macdonald is the heartbeat of the movie, so “Operation Mincemeat” benefits from every scene she’s in. The movie’s up to lots more. Montagu’s brother was a Communist sympathizer and, as British intelligence brass believed (based on some evidence), he may have been spying for the Russians. Higher up the chain of command, Simon Russell Beale nails his two scenes as Winston Churchill, without the prosthetic wonders Gary Oldman had in “Darkest Hour.”
In the margins, future spy novelist Fleming (Johnny Flynn) is seen typing away in the recesses of the basement office. By most accounts, the idea for the real-life Operation Mincemeat came from Fleming, though his superior, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, took credit for it. If that’s a lot of names and particulars to track, well, the film is like that, too. It’s the kind of thing where Firth, as Montagu, rattles through a line such as “Yes, it’s simply a variation on the Haversack Ruse,” and then we get a definition of the Haversack Ruse a little while later.
Macfadyen, lately of “Succession,” takes top stealth honors, deftly capturing the rapid-fire story-conference banter with Firth – they’re a two-man writers’ room, in episodic TV parlance – as well as the forlorn, lovelorn loner not above romantic sabotage. This is not the first film to take on this story: In 1956, director Ronald Neame’s heavily fictionalized “The Man Who Never Was” starred Clifton Webb as Montagu.
Like that film, “Operation Mincemeat” takes liberties. All historically based movies do. Call Madden’s version a civilized shell game that accomplishes its mission, more or less in the spirit of how things actually got made up and went down.
Supposedly the corpse of the fictional Major Martin was not that of Welsh tramp, but that of an unknown sailor from the
HMS ARCHER, The ARCHER was an escort which exploded and sank from an explosion in the aviation gasoline storage tank.
The story that the body came from a tramp was a cover story in that a homeless person would have been malnourished and also suffering from alcoholism which would have been detected at autopsy.
I caught it the other night. It was a fine production. I never cease to be amazed at the British gift for counterintelligence.
As a Boomer, I can confidently state that the movie is a remake of a 50’s film titled “The Man Who Never Was,” with actor Clifton Webb. It’s just Hollywood pretending to have original ideas again.
I have the book from years ago and always knew about Fleming (thats with 1 “M”). In fact this came from an idea from a spy mystery novel about a parachutist found on a farm. The British also pulled off a similar ruse in WWI by having a scout in the mid east drop false war plans on the battlefield.
Yes it’s in there. This version speculated that there were posible German saboteurs working to oust Hitler and they may have used this hoax to hurt the German cause. This included the spy who confronted the fake girlfriend. So the hoax may have worked completely or the German deep state used it to defy Hitler.
The Man Who Never Was. An excellent movie starring Clifton Web.
Yep, that’s it. Thanks.
If anyone is in the neighborhood, The Citadel in Charleston SC has the trunk of HMS Seraph on campus. (The trunk which is used to load torpedoes, and acts as an airlock, and it was thru that trunk that Miller was extracted)
The reviewer says “Hitler bought it” reminding me how he repetitively overruled his Generals and insisted on not taking their advice on strategy fancying himself a master strategist since he had served as a Corporal in WWI as a messenger.
Sad how these people of little intelligence seem to rise to amazing levels of power!
Strangely, much like America in November of 2020! Ugh!
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