Operation Mincemeat

John Madden directs a screen adaptation of Ben MacIntyre’s book based on the true story of Operation Mincemeat, a fascinating story of the most successful deception of the second world war. Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) are intelligence officers, who devise a plan to deceive Hitler and get him to move troops from Sicily, a target for an Allied invasion, to Greece. To do this they take an idea from a young Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn), yes that Ian Fleming, to have a dead body washed ashore in Spain, carrying official papers that contain fake Allied plans to invade Greece. The trick is then to get those papers into the hands of German spies, to Berlin and ultimately to the Fuhrer himself. The plan is so ridiculous, that it is almost doomed to fail, but if they can make it work, it will speed up the Allied advance into Europe and save thousands of lives.

It is a bit of a mixed bag of a film, the true story is fascinating and the complexities and madness of the idea are absorbing. However, what is not as successful are those bits of “artistic licence” like the out of place love story between Montagu, Cholmondeley and Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald).

Performances are of the quality you’d expect from such a fine cast, Firth and Macdadyen share a well-balanced sense of tension, bond and humour. Jason Isaacs brings an unpleasant edge to Admiral John Godfrey and Penelope Wilton, Mark Gatiss and Simon Russell Beale all offer good support.

The script is neat and tidy, developing the film’s eccentric plot at a nice pace and with well-judged humour, especially as you watch Fleming building a cast of characters that would become world-famous. Really the story could have done with more of this and the focus on the remarkably complex mission rather than spending time on its fabricated love interest.

Operation Mincemeat is a fascinating story and while the film is not the unqualified success of the wartime operation. It is good enough to be a worthwhile way to find out about this remarkable and little known piece of the allied war effort.