BEFORE: Penelope Wilton carries over from "Zoo" - there was another film about World War II I could have included in this chain, also with Penelope Wilton, called "Summerland" - I've decided to cut it from the schedule for now, because I've got too many films, if I can cut "Summerland" and one more, I can fit in a second Christmas movie in December, so that's the plan. Fortunately "Summerland" has plenty of connections to other films on my list, so there's a good chance I can re-schedule it in the future - I'll try for next year. I seem to also have a knack for cutting the right film at times, very often the films I cut become crucial links somewhere on down the line, but I guess any film has the potential to be a crucial link down the line, it just depends on what else happens to be on the watchlist at any given time.
I know, it's hard to believe, but I'm thinking about Christmas - it's only 120 days away, after all, which is just about four months, or for me, 68 movies away, if I've planned this right. (Halloween is 43 movies away and Thanksgiving is 57 movies away.)
THE PLOT: During World War II, two intelligence officers use a corpse and false papers to outwit German troops.
AFTER: I'm going to be honest here, sometimes it takes me two or three tries to get a movie watched - and this one took two tries. Maybe I was still recovering from going to work at 5 am on Thursday, or maybe it was the two beers and zero caffeine I had on Friday night, which made it VERY easy to fall asleep during this movie. Or, maybe it's the movie's fault, who can say? There are some long, boring bits in this movie, and when a movie is focused on World War II and a intelligence operation set during that war, it shouldn't be boring, not in the slightest. But maybe there WERE boring bits in World War II, how would I know? I wasn't there. But we, the audience, kind of expect a spy film, fiction or non-fiction, to hold our attention, don't we?
I think the fatal mistake here is that the film spends so much time on the PLANNING of the operation, and that's just not why we tuned in. We want to see the action, the heist, the last-minute escape from the enemy, the shoot-outs and the explosions, and there's just nothing like that to be found in this movie, not in the slightest. The tensest action comes in the base of the Allied operatives, when they're waiting for news regarding the success of the invasion of Sicily to come in, over the telex. That's not exactly thrilling suspenseful stuff - why would I want to watch a film about spies that are essentially waiting for a phone call?
To be fair, there's about thirty seconds of footage devoted to the invasion of Sicily by Allied forces, but the other 99% of the movie is either planning the operation, or waiting to hear if the operation went well. Yawn, wake me up when the shooting starts, please. Now, maybe this is the exact way that things went down, but if so, that doesn't make for a thrilling, grab-you-by-the-eyeballs sort of film, it's more of a thinkpiece, if you could compare the action here to a sport, it would totally be chess, which is not really a great spectator sport. Sure, poker also is a big mental game, and features opponents trying to outwit each other, but at least poker has movement, betting, raising, folding. Chess just has two people moving pieces around on a board and doesn't really heat up until the end. This film is the equivalent of chess, not poker.
It's true that Sicily was invaded by the Allies and they were met with little resistance - because of the deception involved, in making the Nazis think that they were going to try to get a foothold in Greece, not Sicily. And how did they do that? They falsified some papers, correspondence from one general to another, and planted that in a briefcase of a fake pilot, only they dressed up a corpse and made it look like he drowned after his plane crashed. By letting this corpse wash ashore on the coast of Spain, the Allied hoped that whoever discovered the body would turn it over to the authorities, and when German agents heard about it, they'd investigate, find the contents of the briefcase, and pass the intelligence intercepted up the chain, all the way to Hitler himself. And because they found this information by accident, they'd assume it was true, unlike information they'd acquired by surveillance, which could always be faked - the trick came in making appear as if the Nazis found the letters unintentionally, when it was in fact very intentional.
They threw in a love triangle here, which I assume means that some scriptwriter realized how dry and boring this story really was, and what better way to infuse some drama into the lives of these agents than by adding a little romance? So God only knows if this part of the story was true, but among the agents working to craft a believable identity for this fake pilot corpse were a married man whose wife had settled in America for the duration of the war, a widowed secretary and a shy single man. In a more perfect world the shy single man might be able to express his feelings for the widowed secretary, and the widowed secretary might be more attracted to the single man, and also the married man might not develop romantic feelings for the widowed secretary, but clearly it's not a perfect world, it never is. I saw a variation on the same sort of thing back in February in "Their Finest", it's clear that not only is war hell, but it's hell on relationships - some couples got split up by men dying in the war, some didn't survive the separation, and others just sort of dissolved away because everybody was too on edge about being bombed to even think about romance. Does that make sense? Priorities, I guess.
Look, it could have been a lot worse - after reading the plotline I was dreading some kind of 1940's take on "Weekend at Bernie's". Two intelligence officers use a corpse to outwit German troops - you can see there's an awful comedy in there somewhere, right?
Instead, this is all about the Allies trying to figure out what the Nazis are going to do, based on the information they planted - and also wondering if there was really a faction within the German army that was trying to depose or kill Hitler, or if that was itself a deception or a trick. Really, though, Germans are way too serious to pull pranks, trust me on this point. Brits usually are too, but desperate times call for desperate measures. But there are situations shown here that call to mind that scene from "The Princess Bride" where the Sicilian is trying to figure out which goblet holds the poison in it - would his opponent put the poisoned goblet closest to himself, or further away? Would the Germans believe the information they found, or would they tend to NOT believe it, simply because they found it? Did they find it because the Allies wanted them to find it, and if so, should they act on the information they found, or do the opposite? And if they choose to ignore it, would they regret it later - so should they act on it, even if they don't really believe it? God, if this what intelligence operations involve, count me out.
The film doesn't talk about what happened a year later, when the Allies were planning to invade Holland, and a British officer left a bunch of maps and plans for the operation on a glider that he flew in - the Germans found the plans in the glider, but because of Operation Mincemeat, they were convinced it was another set of false documents planted by the British, and they treated them as such, and thus weren't prepared for that invasion, either. Silly Germans.
The credit for this operation is often given to Ian Fleming, who was serving in British Naval intelligence during the war, and appears here as a character. Fleming, of course, went on to write James Bond novels, and an officer in this film complains that he's surrounded by aspiring writers, which is even worse than being surrounded by Nazis. And this real-life Operation Mincemeat also served as the inspiration for Hitchcock's film "North by Northwest".
Also starring Colin Firth (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Kelly Macdonald (ditto), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Johnny Flynn (last seen in "The Dig"), Jason Isaacs (last heard in "Scoob!"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Hattie Morahan (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Mark Bonnar (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Paul Ritter (last seen in "Their Finest"), Ellie Haddington (ditto), Alex Jennings (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), James Fleet (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Nicholas Rowe (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Will Keen (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Charlotte Hamblin, Lorne MacFadyen (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Rufus Wright (last seen in "45 Years"), Jonjo O'Neill (last seen in "Defiance"), Markus von Lingen (ditto), Ruby Bentall (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Alexander Beyer (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Nico Birnbaum, Pep Tosar, Caspar Jennings, Dolly Gadsdon (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Michael Bott (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Paul Lancaster, Simon Rouse, Amy Marston (also last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Gabrielle Creevy, Javier Godino, Pedro Casablanc, Laura Morgan, Alba Brunet, Oscar Zafra with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Gathering Storm")
RATING: 5 out of 10 cheeses paired with Spam
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