Year Released: 2021
Directed by: John Madden
Starring: Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn
(PG-13, 128 min.)
Genre: War, History, Drama

This war is a wilderness of mirrors in which the truth is protected by a bodyguard of lies. This is our war. –Ian Fleming (Author of the James Bond novels)

Did you know Ian Fleming, the famed author who created 007, was a real spy who cut his teeth on one of the biggest deceptions of WWII? Operation Mincemeat, as it was dubbed with typical English gallows humor, involved “the most unlikely of secret agents,” a corpse.

This 1943 deception was hidden until Ewen Montagu’s 1953 book, The Man Who Never Was, and the subsequent 1956 film starring the inimitable Clifton Webb. However, only recently did the role of 007’s creator in this operation come out, and that character (Johnny Flynn) actually narrates the film.

In any story, if it’s a good story, there is that which is seen, and that which is hidden. This is especially true in stories of war. There is the war we see, a contest of bombs and bullets, courage, sacrifice, and brute force. As we count the winner, the losers, and the dead. But alongside this war, another war is waged. A battleground in shades of gray, played out in deception, seduction and bad faith. The participants are strange. They are seldom what they seem, and fiction and reality blur. –Ian Fleming

The inspiration for the operation dates back to 1939, when British intelligence put together the Trout Memo, a list of 54 possible ideas for how they could fool the enemy. The person responsible for the Trout Memo was none other than James Bond novelist Ian Fleming, then a lieutenant commander. Fleming’s involvement in the operation was “one of the most extraordinary discoveries of this story.” Emily Zemler

But, of course, this tactic goes all the way back to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, written and explained five centuries BC.

“All warfare is based on deception. (Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”) Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Operation Mincemeat was a crazy ruse to fool Hitler about the invasion of Sicily and plant the idea that it was really going to be in Greece – a sort of dress rehearsal for the many D Day ruses that followed almost a year later. Thus, one corpse from Operation Mincemeat (July 1943) becomes before the D Day Invasion an entire fabricated Ghost Army (June 1944) complete with inflatable tanks, rubber airplanes, and sound recordings, all under the direction of General George S. Patton.

Once again, Winston Churchill was unconventional, and his acceptance shows that spirit.

“I applaud the fantastic. It has many advantages over the mundane. But the more fantastic, the more foolproof the plan must be.” –Winston Churchill

Read more about it here.

And how much of the fantastic that Churchill applauded in the film was in reality true, or more film/writer fantasy injected into the script to “sex it up a bit”? Read more here about fictional elements injected into what is already a pretty fantastic true story. That is the film world for you. They always have to inject more intrigue and love triangles into an already great story, don’t they?

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America used that same unconventional and shall we say desperate spirit in Argo where a CIA “exfiltration specialist” poses as a Canadian film producer to help free six American holed up in the Canadian Embassy in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

"This is the best bad idea we have, sir," CIA Assistant Deputy Director Jack O'Donnell (Bryan Cranston) candidly tells his superior. It is just marginally better than the previous scheme of putting the six on bikes and having them cycle to the border.

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Of course, the tongue in cheek humor in Operation Mincemeat also makes what is essentially a remake – Hollywood and now Britain’s favorite form of recycling – interesting in and of itself.

It doesn’t hurt that the acting is first rate, and we welcome screen favorites such as the always excellent Colin Firth as intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, and Penelope Wilton, a British acting great in her own right, but best known to Americans as Isobel Crowely from Downton Abby. She is Hester Leggett, the loyal secretary and confidante to Firth’s Montague, and their interchanges are witty and real. A lot of that is in reference to his wife, who has gone to American with the children for safety. In the film, but not necessarily in real life, his wife Iris is upset with Montagu’s devotion to duty, and wants to end the marriage:

Ewen Montague: I want Iris to be happy, even if it comes at the expense of my own happiness.
Hester Leggett: I’ve never heard her say a word about unhappiness.
Ewen Montagu: That’s because she knows you’d jump on a grenade for me.
Hester Leggett: Only on your good days.

Ewen Montague: Iris said if I really cared, I’d come to American with them.
Hester Leggett: Oh, people say all sorts of thing. She knows your duty is to you family and your country. The nightmare marching this was is only too real.

But the for-film invented romantic triangle concerning Montagu, his colleague Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), and Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), the MI5 secretary who also aids in the deception, seems a bit forced, and the writers’ somewhat contrived explanation for it sounds a bit like a Middle Schooler trying to explain a bad report card.

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. It didn’t feel like a stretch to introduce a love triangle.

“It was a two-hander that I turned into a three-hander,” Ashford explains. “When I ran this up the flagpole, everyone said, ‘That makes sense. That doesn’t feel like a violation of the story.’ Because here’s the thing: We don’t know it didn’t happen. We don’t know that Cholmondeley didn’t have a crush on Jean.”

Author Ben Macintyre [who wrote the novel upon which this new film is based] says the affair between Leslie and Montagu has a “decent chance of being true.” The author interviewed Leslie before her death in 2012, but the former secretary refused to acknowledge what had transpired after hours at work.

“She just said, ‘I’m not talking about that anymore. That was a long time ago,’” Macintyre recalls. “In a way that said to me, I think they probably did have an affair, but she doesn’t want to say it. So that element of [the story] has been given a life that we’ll never really know how true it was to life. But that seems, to me, to be perfectly reasonable inside the story like this.” –Emily Zemler

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Although tainted a bit by the contrived love triangle aspect, what does ring true is the adversarial, love-hate relationship between Firth’s Montague and his fellow intelligence officer Charles Cholmondeley. In the end the two respect each other and bond over their mutual anxiety that such an outrageous plan could actually work, such as in the –“I’m going to vomit.” “I’m going to vomit with you.” – sequence.

Yet the film stands, even if they did take a few liberties. Maybe the writers Ben Macintyre (novel) and Michelle Ashford (screenplay) just got caught up in the elaborate fantasies they were chronicling and started creating a few of their own.

After all, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

The new generation might find the original novel penned by Montague himself or the 1956 film that followed not as inviting as this fresh feature that brings this spectacular story to light.

Not to miss.

–Kathy Borich
🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Well, there is the beautiful dinner party to celebrate intelligence officer Montagu’s “retirement” from his pseudo job as a King’s Council Prosecutor, all sparkling crystal and china, and charming speeches. Somehow, I don’t remember the food, though. I didn’t make much of an impression, what with all the intrigue going on before and after it.

Then there was the rashly impetuous moment I actually thought about putting forth a recipe for mincemeat, my father’s favorite Thanksgiving pie, but given the rather lurid reference to the corpse used to fool the Germans, that thought did not long survive.

Ah, but Sicily, not the scene of our film, but its ultimate destination, inspired me. As my Italian/French mother used to say, “ Italian cooking is only excelled by the French, and French cooking is only excelled by the Italian.”

And what better dish than this aptly named Sicilian Blood Orange Salad, just a hint of the brutality of war, cloaked in luscious tenderness of sweet oranges.

Simple and easy to carry off, too. Exactly the opposite of the spy work in our film.

Buon appetito.

Sicilian Blood Orange Salad

Ingredients

· 6 blood oranges, peeled and sectioned

· ¼ cup green onions, sliced

· extra virgin olive oil

· ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper to taste

Directions

Slice each blood orange section in half and remove and discard any seeds. Place oranges in a medium bowl. Add green onions; toss to combine. Drizzle with olive oil until just coated. Lightly sprinkle with pepper. Chill until ready to serve.

Cook's Note:

Ripened naval oranges can be used in place of blood oranges.
*Different Drummers suggestions a hint of lemon juice or even balsamic vinegar.

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