Firth’s gripping tale of deadly deception that helped win war
OPERATION MINCEMEAT (12A) ★★★★✩
THE remarkable story of operation Mincemeat, the covert Second world war scheme to dupe the Germans into thinking Allied invasion forces would land in Greece rather than Sicily, has been told before on the big screen, in the 1956 film The Man who Never was.
But back then, not all the details were known of an extraordinary act of subterfuge, one said to have changed the course of the war.
For example, official secrecy still surrounded the true identity of a corpse which was dressed in naval uniform and allowed to wash up on the coast of neutral Spain, carrying fake papers which British intelligence chiefs hoped would fall into the hands of German spies. As they duly did.
However, we now know the body was that of Glyndwr Michael, a welshman with mental health problems living down and out in London, who died after eating rotting food laced with rat poison.
John Madden’s new film, inspired by Ben Macintyre’s bestselling book of the same name, dramatises an astonishing sequence of events, starting with three intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth), Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) and a certain Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn), cooking up their plan to deceive Hitler.
once a corpse of the right age has been found and given a new identity – no longer a welsh tramp but Major william Martin, a heroic royal Marines officer – Montagu and his team, which also includes the formidable Hester Leggett (Penelope wilton) and MI5 secretary, Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), begin the meticulous process of giving him a back story, including a sweetheart, Pamela.
They know the Germans will check the dead man’s credentials. Every detail must be watertight.
The fierce head of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey (Jason Isaacs), thinks the plan idiotic. But winston Churchill (Simon russell Beale, sensibly eschewing an impersonation) is willing to do anything that might stop the Nazis from anticipating the 1943 Sicily landings.
If they’re ready and waiting, he grunts ominously, then ‘history herself will avert her eyes from the slaughter’. And so the scheme unfolds, with the connivance of British consulate staff in Spain, and in the hope that an autopsy there will not reveal how ‘Bill Martin’ really died. Moreover, the deception also depends on the Germans thinking that the British are desperate to get the papers back, unseen.
A splendidly prosaic ruse, placing a tiny eyelash in one of Bill’s letters, helps to determine whether it’s been read. The ‘fate of the free world’ hangs on this intricate game of bluff and counter-bluff.
Madden, the director, has impressive form in depicting a certain kind of Englishness; his credits include The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011). He’s a master of period drama, too, with Mrs Brown (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) under his belt.
This mostly absorbing film represents another firm tick in an illustrious career, even if Michelle Ashford’s screenplay at times falls into the trap of characters enlightening the audience rather than each other. The Sicily landings are ‘the largest amphibious assault the war has seen’, says one naval man to another, who, I think we can safely assume, already knows.
Nor was I at all convinced by an unnecessary sub-plot, designed to crank up tension between Montagu and Cholmondeley, who are both chastely in love with Leslie (a rather stiff performance by Macdonald) in frightfully repressed 1940s fashion. See also David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).
Yet there is so much gripping detail in operation Mincemeat that none of that really matters. However much dramatic licence has been taken, one incontrovertible fact remains: That this is an astounding true story.
YoU’LL notice, if you’ve read Macintyre’s excellent book, that some of the more outlandish particulars have even been tempered to make them more credible. Those who knew the real Cholmondeley, who ‘gazed at the world through thick pebble spectacles, from behind a remarkable moustache six inches long and waxed into magnificent points’, would not necessarily recognise him in the perfectly dishy Macfadyen, who nevertheless does his best to present as hapless and lovelorn.
There is one other sumptuous ingredient that this film shares with The Man who Never was: The corpse needed transporting from London to Scotland, where it was put on a submarine bound for Spain, in double-quick time. To that end, they used a top British racing driver, St John Horsfall (Mark Bonnar), to get it there.
when Ian Fleming, dashingly played by Flynn and sporadically used here as a narrator, later came to create James Bond, he more than anyone must have known that truth is at least twice as strange as fiction.