Operation Mincemeat

The film is based off of the book British Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre, written after the records were finally declassified and released in 1996. For all the spy film fans out there, this is the real deal. There’s no martinis, no high-speed chases, no super villains with their own island. This is an honest look into how spies and deception potentially turned the tide of the war for the Allies. It is plotting, planning, crafting, waiting, and hoping that forces beyond your control line up perfectly or the blood of thousands are on your hands.

In 1943 Britain had troops in Northern Africa, and Mussolini’s Italy was only a hop, skip, and a beach landing away via Sicily. It was obvious Britain would attack through the island. Everyone knew it, especially the Germans, so it made landing in Sicily without serious casualties a tactical impossibility. There were just too many damn Nazis there waiting. So how do you convince Hitler that England is more interested in Greece? Subterfuge.

Working within a group called the “Twenty Committee” (as in the Roman numerals XX, or double cross), British spies devised and implemented a plot to use a corpse to deliver falsified plans to the Germans, but it wasn’t exactly fool proof. The story has all the trappings of a Monty Python film, leaning into the absurd because the reality is so absurd—a major military operation wholly dependent on one homeless dead man washed up on the shore of Spain with an attaché case full of fake documents. But Operation Mincemeat doesn’t stray into farce. Nor is it your typical WWII movie. Instead, it is a light drama woven through with comedic touches and a hint of a love triangle.

Screenwriter Michelle Ashford, who adapted Macintyre’s book, touched on this in her interview with The Mary Sue. “I also felt the tone of the story was different from many other World War II stories. When I read Ben’s book I thought it was hilarious, and it was because it’s sort of the anti-spy story, in a way. Because it is not a bunch of incredible cool, dashing people doing dashing things and drinking martinis. It’s the opposite. But it is actually the truth of what real spy work is like. And it’s boring and strange and kind of crazy and that’s what I loved about it.”

The best moments in the film find the team eagerly developing an elaborate backstory for their corpse-turned-war-hero. They give him a name—William Martin—a personal history, and even a sweetheart back home. It is almost comedic how detailed this fake man’s life was, and yet how devoted his creators were to his story. As Montagu says, “The crucial thing is that he must be real. As real as you or I.”

Ashford’s script also implies that those working under the employment of the government were more interested in fiction than their reality, caught up in the romance of what spy life could be. At one point, Cholmondeley asks for voices to be hushed, not due to spies but something much worse—authors! The most famous of all being Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, but it turns out lots of military men were aspiring novelists. As we learned from Our Flag Means Death, truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, Ian Fleming really was part of Operation Mincemeat. He was the assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence, Rear Adm. John Godfrey, played by Jason Isaacs in the film.

It’s also true that Montagu (Colin Firth) used the real Jean Leslie’s (Kelly Macdonald) photo, which was planted on the corpse as his “girlfriend” Pam. The pair did call themselves Bill and Pam after the corpse and his true love. What appears to be fiction is the love triangle between Montagu, Leslie, and Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen). Of course, being British and also colleagues, they don’t express their feelings directly, but the actors convey them clearly with longing glances. As director John Madden said, “In wartime, you’re dealing with a world where people are thrust together with extreme emotional stakes. We wanted to explore that idea of people coming together to create a larger fiction who are then changed and lost in the fiction they are creating.” Operation Mincemeat does a great job of pulling in its audience into the romance and drama of it all in much the same way.