IMITATION GAME
The Alan Turing film reviewed.
UNTIL RECENTLY not enough people in the world knew who Alan Turing was and why he was so important. A stunning new movie, The Imitation Game, is now changing that. It stars Sherlock’s slyly handsome Benedict Cumberbatch as the computer pioneer and World War II code breaker, finally shining a light on Turing’s huge contribution to the planet (he saved us from the Nazis, basically) and on his appalling treatment after the war due to his homosexuality.
Turing was one of the “heroes of Bletchley Park”. They were Britain’s top-secret codebreaking team during the war years of 19391945, which the government made their top priority. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went so far as to declare that Turing had made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany. This new historical thriller details how Turing led a team that helped crack the Germans’ Enigma code.
Based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, the screenplay version lay unproduced for a number of years with Leonardo DiCaprio originally slated to play Turing. When Leo decided it wasn’t for him after all it fell into the lap of Oscar-worthy British actor Benedict Cumberbatch and it got the greenlight in 2013.
During production there was plenty of kerfuff le about what some saw as a beefing up of Turing’s “romance” with his one-time fiancé, Joan Clarke (the way too pretty Keira
Knightley) and the downplaying of his true sexuality. The producers even issued a statement to drive home the point that “there is not – and never has been – a version of our script where Alan Turing is anything other than homosexual, nor have we included fictitious sex scenes.”
That said, the film also does not include any gay sex scenes, which might be the producers’ way of going a little softy-softy and aiming for a more mainstream audience. It’s a shame this is the case because the downfall of Alan Turing is all about his open homosexuality after his eventual arrest for “gross indecency”.
The film doesn’t shy away from the role that rigid-and-frigid British society played in the post-war years, leading to Turing’s early death in 1954. The computer genius and elite marathon runner (who almost made the 1948 Olympics) was arrested in 1952 for admitting that he was having a sexual relationship with a younger man. Instead of going to prison on the charge, he agreed to be “cured” of his aff liction and be given chemical castration with regular oestrogen injections. He died just before his 42nd birthday of cyanide poisioning, which an inquest found to be suicide but others believe to be more suspicious. His biographers, however, think Turing put the cyanide into an apple found next to his bed so he could re-enact the poison apple scene from his favourite fairytale, Snow White.
If there is any good that has come from the case of Alan Turing it is that the history books have now been re-written to include his great service to the British Empire and beyond, and also to acknowledge the appalling way he was treated. The British government even made a statement to that effect on December 24, 2013 with Queen Elizabeth II granting Turing an official pardon. Oddly enough, that was also the same time that trailers for The Imitation Game first debuted.
Although it would be cynical to believe the producers of the movie only pushed for Turing’s pardon for publicity, at least Alan Turing can now rightly take his place as a hero in the public eye, even if he was scorned during his own lifetime. Little wonder Time magazine saw f it to include him as one of the “100 Most Important People Of The 20th Century”. Not only is Alan Turing certainly that, he is also one of the most important people in the history of the struggle for gay equal rights, too. Lest we forget.
MORE: The Imitation Game is released through Roadshow Entertainment.