Operation Mincemeat

In this World War II drama from Netflix, a team of spies uses a vagrant's corpse to outwit the Nazis.

But “Operation Mincemeat” is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic. Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu, a former barrister who teams up with Charles Cholmondeley, played by Matthew Macfadyen, after hearing his plan to deceive Hitler by using forged papers attached to a corpse. In this bizarrely celebratory tale, the titular “mincemeat” is a troubling figure, weighing heavy on the conscience as the men who’ve enlisted him engage in petty infighting.

It might sound like the title for a gory, straight-to-video action movie, but Operation Mincemeat was a real World War II strategy – a secret Allied scheme ...

In Madden's version of the story, the committee selects the corpse of a vagrant (portrayed in flashback by Lorne MacFadyen) who drank himself to death on rat poison. Madden and cinematographer Sebastian Blenkov ( Their Finest) shoot in anamorphic wide-screen for that old-school feel, delivering the kind of war movie your grandpa would love (that's a compliment, especially in an era where too many films resemble over-lit television shows). The corpse drop is the brainchild of Firth's intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, a middle-aged judge who family and friends believe to be serving as a naval commander. The answer, of course, is obvious. A romantic triangle between Macfadyen, Firth and Macdonald, meanwhile, doesn't catch fire despite the actors' charms – and Firth, reliable as ever, and Macdonald, a long-underrated trouper, are both very good here. Allied forces are plotting a crucial invasion of Sicily, but in order to divert attention from the operation and give their troops the best chance at success, they're determined to leak information to Nazi intelligence about a bogus campaign launching in Greece.

In Netflix's new movie, Colin Firth dresses up a corpse to fool the Nazis. Here's what really happened.

The film also invents a sister who eventually appears to claim his body and stand up for a brother whose body was exploited without his permission. Some refuse to believe that Glyndwr Michael actually played the role of Maj. Martin, believing, instead, that the conspirators used a more recently deceased corpse of a Royal Navy drowning victim. Sometimes the film’s characters suggest the “fate of the world” hung in the balance, but we can read that as saying the “fate of the world” depended on the Allies’ ultimate success in the invasion of Europe. True enough. Von Roenne was, in fact, one of the July 20 Plotters who fomented a plan to blow up Hitler—but none of those men actually wanted Germany defeated. Historians disagree, but Ivor was probably an informant and sometime-recruiter for Soviet intelligence, though it’s not clear he had access to great secrets, even his brother’s. Ivor was married and did not live with Ewen, as depicted in the film. The real Cholmondeley had a brother who died in the retreat to Dunkirk in spring 1940, adding to a sense that he had been cursed by fate to be left on the sidelines in this war. Isaacs’ Adm. Godfrey plays the role of a foil in the film, but there’s little evidence for the character’s opposition to the Mincemeat idea, and none for his machinations to stop it, in the historical record. He was hardly a newbie in the world of intelligence when attending his first Twenty Committee meeting, as was depicted in the film. That, in turn, gives Godfrey-Isaacs a bargaining chip—he can pull any string and get the remains home—with which to tempt Cholmondeley to spy on Ewen Montagu, a perfectly fictional part of the film. He was a filmmaker and critic, a champion table tennis player, a conservationist, and a philanthropist. Operation Mincemeat, available on Netflix as of Wednesday, tells the story of the most successful trick Britain played during World War II. The context for this story begins in January 1943, even before the Allies had fully driven the Germans from North Africa, when Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met in Casablanca, Morocco, to plan the invasion of Europe. The Soviets had withstood the nearly undivided might of the German war machine for a year and a half. This idea morphed into “Operation Mincemeat,” which was, like all mission names, randomly drawn from a list of meaningless operation titles and not, as the film implies, picked because of its gruesome nature.

“Operation Mincemeat” looks like a proper British spy drama and for the most part, well, it is. It's based on the true story of wartime daring and heroism, ...

And mistrust begins to bubble up among everyone on the team as deceptions within the deception emerge. At times, you may wish Madden had taken the same kind of chances as the masterminds behind Operation Mincemeat, but his film is still sufficiently rousing. But while the film as a whole may seem dense and restrained, the performances and attention to detail consistently bring it to life. Firth’s Ewen Montagu and Macfadyen’s Charles Cholmondeley lead the scheme to secure a body, dress it in a military uniform and dump it off the coast of Spain in the hope that it will wash ashore with a briefcase full of fake documents intact. Macdonald and Firth have a sweet and easy chemistry tinged with the slightest sadness and world-weariness. “Operation Mincemeat” looks like a proper British spy drama and for the most part, well, it is.

REVIEW: Featuring not one, but two Mr Darcys, this is something far more accessible, engaging and human than your average wartime espionage thriller.

And Montagu, of course, omitted the fact that he had fallen head over heels for a young colleague – and that she had provided a photograph of herself posing as the sweetheart of the fictional officer. When filmmakers are routinely foully abused – by me, anyway – for inventing love affairs to insert into real-life dramas, it was refreshing to find out that this part of the Operation Mincemeat script was absolutely genuine. Director John Madden (Shakespeare In Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is probably just about the best filmmaker alive (Roger Michell RIP) to pair with this material.

He sits down with a bunch of pale important men to discuss British war strategy. The German fascists have a stronghold in Italy. The Brits want to pretend to ...

There are moments when the film lists a bit under the weight of a needless subplot or two (the my-brother-might-be-a-Russian-spy one, for example) at the expense of further quietly delightful interactions between Macdonald (showing complex character shades) and Firth (in a role Michael Caine might’ve played 25 years ago). And visually, it’s Just Fine, maybe making one wish for the vibrant indulgences of a Joe Wright endeavor. The film’s keenest irony is how it underscores the madness of the deception plan – which makes putting a message in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean a viable alternative – with British decorum, which all but demands that no one raise their voice or unbutton a collar despite the mighty, sweaty-bollocks tension of a situation. – for the sake of believability, and plan a series of maneuvers to get him into the hands of the murderous bastards who are their enemy, we learn about how sad our three principals are: Montagu’s strained marriage finds him taking a shine to the widow Leslie, although Cholmondeley is also interested in her, and single, and therefore the more viable romantic candidate despite his being an utter dorkwad. But none are more complicated than the wargames here – getting the Nazis to swallow their little corpse scheme, then hoping that they’re not onto the scheme and counterscheming with their own phony intelligence, and therefore only pretending to avert forces to Greece while actually remaining fortified in Sicily. And it’s even more complicated than that, believe it or not. It drops something in the water as battleships ready themselves for the thing that’s the first part of that compound word. A solemn Firth voiceover goes on about the seen and hidden battles of wartime, and he’s one who fights on a “battleground in shades of gray.” We see a submarine surface at nighttime.

We examine with director John Madden the real World War II history that inspired Netflix's Operation Mincemeat.

As with the routes taken by the film’s many double and triple agents, this is a path shrouded in shadow and ambiguity. Otherwise, in the grander scheme of Operation Mincemeat, their story is done after the body of “William Martin” is jettisoned out of a submarine and washes up on a Spanish beach. It’s true that Hitler was intensely paranoid at that point because the war machine had been completely built on materials he was getting from the Balkans, and obviously having no idea how long that conflict was going to last, that was a very, very essential factor to him. It’s true [the British] were pushing on an open door with the idea that the attack was going to come through Greece and Sardinia. And the cover plan of that supposed attack was Sicily, which is a lovely inversion. “Once you’re into this part of the story, there are a number of theories, and you’ll find different ones,” says Madden. But what is inarguable is varying heads of German military intelligence and the army at large participated in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. That was something that was not known and didn’t become clear until [after the war]. Unsurprisingly, it was not in the first account of the story!” Inevitably, if you’re going to follow the story where it goes, then you’re going to somehow end up in the Abwehr, and that’s obviously a very difficult shape for the story.” Von Witzleben was Hitler’s most trusted confidant on military matters, according to Madden, “and for his betrayal he was hung on a meat hook and left to die in that state for three days or something like that. Indeed, Ivor Goldsmid Samuel Montagu was born the younger brother to Ewen and was a well-known British filmmaker, critic, and, strangely enough, ping-pong player after his time at Cambridge. All of which—including the then-foreign game of ping-pong—made him a person of interest to MI5 following his outspoken sympathies for communism in the 1930s. “[Montagu] invented a complete fiction of how they arrived at the body,” Madden says of the 1956 film. Says Madden, “When Ben came to approach the material, he benefited from the fact that in the mid-1990s, the Mincemeat files alongside dozens of others from wartime intelligence were declassified… Says Madden, “The interesting breakthrough for [screenwriter Michelle Ashford] and I was the idea of framing the story around a novel Fleming had not yet written.

'Operation Mincemeat' director cast Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, both of whom appeared as Mr. Darcy in adaptations of Jane Austen's 'Pride and ...

I mean, it's not relevant to us at all, as the filmmakers, but of course, it's of interest to other people, I realize that. I'd always felt Colin Firth was the perfect actor to play Montagu but was held up for a while because Colin is technically older than Montagu was at the time of the film. Actually, that's kind of irrelevant because a man of 41, which is what Montagu was at the time, looked more like 61 at that point." "I think it was probably pointed out to me by Colin's agent," says the filmmaker. I shot the script around to him, and he came back very, very quickly, like the day after he'd read it, and that was a slam dunk." Then it wasn't set in stone, and suddenly, it opened up.

This handsome but dull film isn't nearly as fascinating as the true story on which it's based.

That’s the one that the Brits went with, oddly enough, and a recently deceased Briton was conscripted to serve as the decoy. These men and (very infrequently) women will discuss, with stiff-upper-lip stoicism, how the fate of the world is in their hands. More often, however, slightly less good directors will choose to explore the men and (rarely) women behind the war — generals, politicians, spies and overwhelmed government functionaries.

Based on a true story, “Operation Mincemeat” (2021) follows the eponymous British military operation aimed at disguising the Allied invasion of Sicily.

A mysterious presence is haunting the waters of the eastern coast of England. Is it a vengeful sea beast? Gifts processed in this system are not tax deductible, but are predominately used to help meet the local financial requirements needed to receive national matching-grant funds. “Hacks” is available on HBO Max.

The film centers around Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley, members of the Twenty Committee, a small group of British intelligence agents in charge of double ...

But Cerruti was able to convince Admiral Moreno to hand over the documents to Kühlenthal. The letter had reached the Germans, and the briefcase was handed to the British Embassy. The team waited for news as the British troupe was on their way to Sicily. While intelligence indicated that the Germans were moving toward Greece and did buy into their story, they were still not entirely convinced, especially after the Teddy incident. While the rest of the team rejoiced in the fact that their plan had worked, Jean had to face an unexpected revelation. Jean Leslie married a soldier who was among the first wave of the Sicilian invasion, a year after the war. Adolf Clauss, the German agent and member of Abwehr, requested the Spanish officials for the documents, but it was too late since the briefcase had already traveled to Madrid. After Clauss failed to procure it, the senior agent of the Abwehr, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, made attempts to get hold of the letter; they were convinced that it had information that would expose the British invasion plan. The body was submerged on April 29th and was recovered by the Spanish fisherman on April 30th. Along with that, they also had to keep in mind to keep the letter from Sir Nye in a briefcase to attract more attention. It was this factor that brought Jean closer to the case and Ewen. Along with the picture, they wrote a love letter that could be used as a part of the pocket litter. While there was no dearth of bodies, it was important to find one that was unclaimed. The corpse was the primary element that they had to find to execute the operation. His wife was not in favor of this separation, but he had no other way to deal with the crisis. They were half Jewish, and he knew that if they lost the war, his family would have to face the consequences.

The Netflix drama 'Operation Mincemeat,' starring Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, is based on the unbelievable true story of a macabre espionage mission.

“The idea of planting a false story with the enemy is as old as war — that goes back to the Trojan Horse,” Macintyre adds. “[It was important] to really try and find in the movie the messiness of war,” Ashford notes. It was that meta aspect of the story that most attracted Madden. “They took a fictional idea and tried their very best to make it into an idea that appeared to be absolutely real,” the director adds. For Madden, it was useful to have these emotional, human undercurrents in the film because it might be easy to get bogged down in technical detail. But it wasn’t until 1996 that Michael’s true identity was revealed, and an inscription was added to his tombstone in 1998. I loved that part of the story because I found it complicated and poignant and curious. The sister showing up was a fictionalized element of the story. “The story of Operation Mincemeat is true,” explains Macintyre, who was involved in the process of making the film. “One of the things that Fleming did was to draw up, with Godfrey, a memo called the Trout Memo, [which is] now quite famous in intelligence studies. So that element of [the story] has been given a life that we’ll never really know how true it was to life. According to Ashford, it is true that Montagu and Leslie wrote each other a series of letters as fictitious characters and they did sometimes go out. I love the idea that it comes from a novel and it’s picked up by another novelist.”