10 Films to Watch if You Like: Operation Mincemeat

It's two for the price of one in the latest entry in Cinema Paradiso's What to Watch Next series. John Madden's Operation Mincemeat (2021) revisits the story told in Ronald Neame's The Man Who Never Was (1955). However, neither film quite tells the whole truth about one of the most audacious and contentious enterprises of the entire Second World War.

When it comes to war movies, many will think of derring-do on the battlefield or heroics in the air or at sea. But conflicts aren't exclusively about military encounters, as is demonstrated by films like Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945), Peter Ustinov's School For Secrets (1946), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Sink the Bismarck! (1960), Lone Scherfig's Their Finest (2018) and Lydia Dean Pilcher's A Call to Spy (2019).

Joining the ranks for pictures about the unsung is John Madden's Operation Mincemeat (2021). Much of its action takes place in a small room in the bowels of the Admiralty in London. But there isn't a dull moment in this detailed, dramatic and occasionally droll account of how an ingenious scheme changed the entire course of the 1939-45 war.

Operation Mincemeat: Ciné-Vérité

During his 1942 conference with Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Casablanca, Winston Churchill, promised the American president that the British would advance from North Africa and open up a front in southern Europe that would divert German forces from the battle with the Soviet Union and pave the way for an invasion of France. The only problem was the everyone knew that Sicily was the only viable point of attack on the so-called 'soft underbelly of Europe'.

With the Americans keen to launch an assault in the summer of 1943, the Twenty Committee was tasked with finding a way of convincing Nazi intelligence that the Allies were planning a strike on Greece or Sardinia rather than Sicily. Admiral John Godfrey (Jason Isaacs) assures Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) that a suitable ruse can be found in the 'Trout Memo', which he had drawn up with Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn) and had named because its strategies were designed to hook the Nazis and reel them in.

Despite admitting it wasn't a very nice suggestion, Fleming was particularly fond of item 28 in the memo. This involved allowing Abwehr agents to come into possession of official documents that had been found on the corpse of an officer whose plane had supposedly crashed en route to North Africa. Convinced that this method of passing false information had the best chance of success, Twenty Committee chairman, John Masterman (Alex Jennings), entrusted the mission to Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen).

Having joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1938, Montagu had suspended his career as a barrister to work for British intelligence. As his wife, Iris (Hattie Morahan), had just taken their two children to the United States (amidst certain marital difficulties), Montagu was able to dedicate much of his time to the operation, as he had no desire to consort with his louche younger brother, Ivor (Mark Gatiss). Cholmondeley also had sibling issues, as his brother had been killed in India and his mother (Ellie Haddington) was badgering him to bring her favourite son home for burial.

Joining Cholmondeley and Montagu in Room 13 were the latter's trusted assistant, Hester Leggett (Penelope Wilton), and Jean Leslie (Kelly Macdonald), a widowed secretary who offers a bathing suit snapshot to go in the dead officer's pocket. Amongst the other 'wallet litter' is an overdraft reminder from the bank, stubs from two theatre tickets and a love letter from a fictitious fiancée named Pam, which has been movingly written by Hester.

While both Montagu and Cholmondeley become fond of Jean while devising the details designed to make Captain (Acting Major) William Martin seem authentic, they have a problem finding a corpse that could credibly play the Royal Marine. Aware that an autopsy would be carried out by the Spanish authorities, they needed a body that could pass for a drowning victim. St Pancras coroner Bentley Purchase (Paul Ritter) informs the pair of Glyndwr Michael, a Welsh vagrant with no known relations, who had died from ingesting bread laced with rat poison. With the help of Q Branch boffin Charles Fraser-Smith (James Fleet), a dry ice canister is built to preserve the cadaver on the drive north to the submarine base at Holy Loch, where HMS Seraph is waiting to deposit the decoy in the waters off Huelva on the Spanish coast.

Overcoming a last-minute hitch, when Michael's sister comes forward to claim her kin, Cholmondeley boards the submarine bound for the Gulf of Cádiz. He has been approached by Godfrey to spy on Montagu (because Ivor is a known Communist) in return for his brother's return from Chittagong. Angry with Montagu for flirting with Jean, he agrees, even though he is certain that Montagu would never betray his country.

Once Martin had been found by Spanish fishermen and handed over to the local coroner, messages are sent from London for the Nazis to pick up about the significance of the documents contained in the case chained to the Marine's wrist. Captain David Ainsworth (Nicholas Rowe), the naval attaché in Madrid, also strives to ensure that the Spanish authorities alert agent Karl Kuhlenthal (Alexander Bayer) to a letter mentioning the Greek invasion, so that he can pass it on spy chief, Alexis von Roenne (Nico Birnbaum).

There's dismay in Whitehall when the case is returned. However, Montagu realises that an eyelash he has inserted in the letter is no longer in the seemingly unopened envelope. He fears that the Nazis have rumbled the hoax when Jean is visited by Teddy (Jonjo O'Neill), a Gargoyle Club bartender working for the Nazis, who has recognised her from the photo in Martin's possession. She swears that the Marine was genuine, even though he was travelling under an alias and Montagu and Cholmondeley come to the conclusion that Von Roenne (who is part of a conspiracy to overthrow Hitler) has accepted the veracity of the leaked information because the Führer is certain of its accuracy and, therefore, would be weakened by a successful attack on Sicily in the wake of forces being diverted to the bogus targets.

Hurt by the perception that the married Montagu has been trifling with her affections, Jean accepts a post in Special Operations and leaves the capital. Blaming each other, Montagu and Cholmondeley have words over Jean and Ivor. The success of the mission, however, means that they wander off together to find a drink at 8am on the morning the Allies storm Sicily and encounter much-reduced resistance.

What Really Happened

A running joke in Operation Mincemeat centres on the number of future authors involved in the plot. Easily the most celebrated was Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond in a series of novels that have been inspiring film-makers for six decades, since Sean Connery played 007 in Terence Young's Dr No (1962).

Fleming didn't come up with Number 28 in the Trout Memo on his own, however. During the Great War, the 'Haversack Ruse' had been employed to leak fake documents to the Ottoman brass before a key battle in Palestine in 1917. It had also resurfaced in North Africa in 1942, when a minefield map was planted on a corpse in a bombed scout car to lure the Nazis into a trap.

According to historian Ben Macintyre (whose book, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story That Changed the Course of World War II, provided the basis for Michelle Ashford's screenplay), Fleming also took cues from The Milliner's Hat Mystery, a thriller written by Basil Thomson, who had interrogated the Dutch dancer played by Greta Garbo in George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari (1931) and run one of the agents spying on the Irish revolutionary respectively essayed by Liam Neeson in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins (1996) and Sebastian Thommen in the 2016 mini-series, Rebellion.

Incidentally, Sir Miles Messervy, who was codenamed 'M' and was played by Bernard Lee in the first 11 Bond movies, was based on Fleming's boss, Sir John Godfrey. He had actually been posted to India before Operation Mincemeat was launched, but he remains in situ in the guise of Jason Isaacs for the film's duration. Charles Fraser-Smith, who was based at the Ministry of Supply, was Fleming's model for 'Q', who was played by Desmond Llewellyn in 17 Bonds from Terence Young's From Russia With Love (1963) to Michael Apted's The World Is Not Enough (1999). The role subsequently passed to John Cleese and Ben Whishaw, although Geoffrey Bayldon took it in the multi-directored Casino Royale (1967) before Alec McCowen took over for Connery's renewed his licence to kill in Irvin Kershner's Never Say Never Again (1983).

When Cholmondeley originally alighted upon Number 28, he proposed naming the operation 'Trojan Horse' after the story recorded in Homer's The Iliad and retold in Robert Wise's Helen of Troy (1956) and Wolfgang Petersen's Troy (2004). However, it was agreed by his colleagues on the Twenty Committee (named for the Roman numerals XX or 'Double Cross') that the codename was a little obvious and the more macabre 'Mincemeat' was used instead. Although attempts were made to photograph the corpse for Martin's identity papers, the results proved unsatisfactory and it was decided to find a lookalike, with Madden and Ashford opting for an American GI who had been dating Jean. What the pair didn't reveal, however, was that the cadaver's feet had frozen in cold storage and that Montagu and Cholmondeley had to thaw them out before they could put its boots on.

The corpse was buried in Huelva with the named William Martin on the gravestone. In 1996, however, amateur historian Roger Morgan came across the name Glyndwr Michael in a recently declassified document. The son of a miner from the Welsh village of Aberbargoed, Michael took a number of menial jobs before leaving for London in 1940. It's believed that the 34 year-old was homeless and had mental health issues that prompted him to commit suicide by eating bread left in a King's Cross warehouse to poison rats.

Michael didn't have a sister. She was invented to reinforce the fact that he had been a real person and wasn't simply a prop in an elaborate charade. But not everyone is convinced that Michael was Martin. Historians John and Noreen Steele suggest he might have been John Melville, who had perished during the accidental loss of the aircraft carrier HMS Dasher on the River Clyde. Colin Gribbons reckoned crewmate Tom Martin was chosen to play his namesake. But the Dasher claims have been countered by the Royal Navy. Moreover, Professor Denis Smyth has since published a memo and an official report in which Montagu himself refers to Glyndwr Michael by name.

Madden has justified other tweaks with the truth by claiming that Operation Mincemeat was about the creation of a fiction and that he and Ashford (who admits basing the script's structure on Madden's 1998 Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love ) had a degree of licence to concoct some speculative occurrences of their own. For instance, they have Churchill being informed of the scheme from the outset, when he was actually only told about it two weeks before it was implemented. Similarly, Montagu is shown attending his first Twenty Committee meeting, when he had been a member of this inner sanctum for some time.

Equally bogus is the subplot about Cholmondeley's brother, as he had been killed while retreating to Dunkirk in 1940 and had been nowhere near the India-Burma border. Cholmondeley himself didn't personally oversee the operation in the Gulf of Cádiz, although he did wear Martin's uniform in order to make it look lived in. Also true is the fact that neither he nor Montagu had a clue about the fate of the faux documents after the body was recovered, even though members of the Abwehr hierarchy had decided they were genuine. Madden and Ashford intimate that Von Roenne had authenticated the papers in order to highlight the Führer's fallibility and help bring about his downfall.

It's certain that the Nazis made attempts to verify Martin's status and the likelihood that he would have been entrusted with correspondence between such high-ranking members of the military hierarchy. However, the scene in which Jean is confronted by an undercover agent is pure bunkum. The most pivotal invention, however, is the romantic attachment between Montagu and Jean Leslie and the resentment that it sparked in Cholomondeley.

At the time she worked for MI5 (rather than in Room 13), Leslie was in her late teens and not a widow at all. The snapshot was taken in the banks of the Thames in Oxfordshire by one of her many admirers, none of whom she took seriously. In a 2010 BBC documentary, Operation Mincemeat, Leslie told Macintyre that she and Montagu had inhabited the roles of Martin and Pam in order to make the cover story more plausible. She admits that there might have been some flirting with the 42 year-old father of two and that she had enjoyed the adventure. However, she shies away from confirming any dalliance, even though she seems to have kept the letters that 'Bill' had written to 'Pam'.

In the film, Hester alerts Iris Montagu to her husband's fixation. But it was actually his mother (as he was living with her in Kensington) who raised the alarm. There's no such paper trail between Leslie and Cholmondeley, however, and the notion of a ménage is much more fanciful than that of any Montagu/Leslie fling. However, MI5 did have misgivings about Ivor Montagu and Cholmondeley was approached about surveilling him.

A Cinematic Sub-Plot

Played by Mark Gatiss, Ivor Montagu is a rather peripheral figure in Operation Mincemeat. Living with Ewen after Iris leaves for America, he pops up to offer snide comments on his brother's private life and his activities in Room 13. However, Sir John Godfrey is sufficiently disconcerted by Ivor's own antics to sound out the disgruntled Cholmondeley about a deal to keep tabs on the Montagu with a possible connection to the Kremlin.

It feels as though scenes involving Ivor have been left on the cutting-room floor, as he is never seen acting suspiciously (under Cholmondeley's gaze or otherwise) and often finds himself a bystander in his older sibling's shadow. This is a shame, as Ivor Montagu is a fascinating character who shared a passion for film with all Cinema Paradiso users.

The third son born into a prominent Jewish banking family, Ivor studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he became so proficient at table tennis that he helped organise the first world championships in 1926. He was also involved in the founding of the International Table Tennis Federation and the English Table Tennis Association.

In 1925, Ivor joined forces with Sidney Bernstein to launch the London Film Society, which specialised in showing arthouse and independent titles in defiance of the censorship laws imposed by the 1909 Cinematograph Act. Among the pictures selected was Charlie Chaplin's The Champion (1915; which can be found on The Mutual Comedies ), Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924) and Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). The latter was deemed particularly contentious, as it was considered Communist propaganda and had been banned from mainstream cinemas.

While writing reviews for The Observer and The New Stateman, Ivor made a number of comic shorts, including The Tonic, Day-Dreams and Blue Bottles (all 1928). Starring Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, the latter was hailed as a pioneering British contribution to the burgeoning avant-garde cinema. It was admired by Alfred Hitchcock, who had hired Ivor to edit and write the intertitles for his silent thriller, The Lodger (1926). He also worked uncredited on the editing of Downhill and Easy Virtue (both 1927) and, when Hitch moved to Gaumont-British, Ivor served as an unbilled associate producer on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Secret Agent and Sabotage (both 1936). These were all espionage stories and it says much for Hitchcock's dark sense of humour that he had recruited a man with rumoured links to MI5.

Having joined the Communist Party and befriended the exiled Leon Trotsky, Ivor accompanied Eisenstein on his 1930 trip to America, where he met with Walt Disney, among others. As a companion piece to Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), Peter Greenaway is currently working on Eisenstein in Hollywood, which may well draw on Ivor's 1968 memoir of the excursion. In 1934, he collaborated with Geoffrey Barkas on Wings Over Everest (1934) before returning to Europe to nail his colours to the Communist mast with the Spanish Civil War documentaries, Defence of Madrid (1936) and Peace and Plenty (1939).

These titles, along with the fact that Ivor had been a founder member of the Association of Cinematograph and Television Technicians, the Progressive Film Institute and the World Council of Peace clearly set off alarm bells within the British establishment. Yet, when the Ministry of Information needed someone to direct a documentary exposing the perniciousness of German and Japanese notions of racial supremacy, it was Ivor who was summoned to direct Man: One Family (1946).

Perhaps the commission might have gone elsewhere had MI5 been able to decipher Soviet messages from 1940, which appear to suggest that Ivor was spying under the codename 'Intelligentsia'. However, even the decrypting of the 'Venona telegraphs' in the 1960s failed to clarify the precise nature of the information (if any) that Ivor had passed to the Kremlin. By the time of Operation Mincemeat, of course, Joseph Stalin was Churchill's ally and the Montagus were fighting for the same cause. Ivor remained of interest during the Cold War, however, and was viewed as a potential way of tagging Charlie Chaplin on behalf of the FBI after he left the United States in 1952. Instead, he was left to his table tennis and cinephilia, with Film World (1964) being the pick of his screen writings.

The Man Who Never Was

Taking its title from Ewen Montagu's heavily vetted 1953 bestseller, Ronald Neame's The Man Who Never Was unsurprisingly prioritises the author's perspective. Indeed, Montagu even got to interrogate Clifton Webb's bearded version of himself in an uncredited cameo as an air vice-marshal.

There's no sign of Cholmondeley, although Montagu does have a willing sidekick in Lieutenant George Acres (Robert Flemyng). Ian Fleming is also conspicuous by his absence, while Jean Leslie and Hester Leggett are combined in the character of Pam (Josephine Griffin), who is Montagu's secretary. Her American roommate, Lucy Sherwood (Gloria Grahame) comes to play a crucial role in the plot, as she is made the object of William Martin's epistolary affections.

Once again, Winston Churchill (voiced off screen by Peter Sellers) approves of Operation Mincemeat at its inception, while Montagu finds an eager ally in Admiral Cross (Laurence Naismith), who assuages the doubts of such military high-ups as General Archibald Nye (Geoffrey Keene) and Admiral Louis Mountbatten (Peter Williams).

Rather than Bentley Purchase, Montagu is aided in securing a corpse by Sir Bernard Spilsbury (André Morell), a pathologist who had been involved in a number of high-profile murders cases, two of which were later filmed as Dr Crippen (Robert Lynn, 1963) and The Brides in the Bath (Harry Bradbeer, 2003). An opening caption explains why Glyndwr Michael remains anonymous: 'Military security and respect for a solemn promise have made it necessary to disguise the identity of some of the characters in this film.' However, a closing phrase, 'but in all other essentials this is the true story of "Major William Martin",' is somewhat undermined by the fact that the Welshman becomes a Scot whose father (Moultrie Kelsall) grants permission for his son to become an accidental hero.

This switch of nationality was perhaps made to justify the opening quotation from the Scottish ballad, 'The Battle of Otterburn', which is intoned over a shot of a body washed up on a Spanish beach: 'Last night I dreamed a deadly dream/Beyond the Isle of Skye/I saw a dead man win a fight/And I think that man was I.' These lines are repeated at the conclusion to remind viewers of the sacrifice that a 'lunatic' who had succumbed to pneumonia had made for his country.

In order to ensure that the attaché case containing the misinformation reaches the Germans, Admiral Cross plays an active part in sending messages for spies to intercept that emphasise the necessity of the documents being retrieved unseen. Miles Malleson gets to play a scientist who conducts chemical tests to deduce whether the Nye letter containing the hints about Greece has been skillfully resealed. But Operation Mincemeat shows how Montagu had placed an eyelash in the folds of the paper to confirm whether the missive had been perused.

Just as the Abwehr dispatch a sleeper agent to check on Pam, disaffected Irishman, Patrick O'Reilly (Stephen Boyd), is dispatched to determine whether Lucy really is William Martin's sweetheart. As ill luck would have it, she had just learned of the death of her RAF fiancé, Joe (William Russell), and gives a credible display of grief. Nevertheless, Neame and BAFTA-winning screenwriter, Nigel Balchin, add a tense coda that sees Montagu persuade General Coburn (Michael Hordern) from Scotland Yard's Special Branch to let O'Reilly escape, so as not to alert handler, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Wolf Frees), to the fact that his mission has been rumbled.

The action concludes with Montagu visiting the Huelva cemetery to leave his OBE on William Martin's grave. It was a typically noble gesture on the part of a character who combines patriotism, pragmatism and compassion. The real Montagu must have been delighted with Clifton Webb's portrayal. But there seems to be no record of what Cholmondeley thought of it all.

Traces in the Sand

As an insider in Churchill's cabinet, Alfred Duff Cooper returned from his stint as British Ambassador to France to write Operation Heartbreak (1950). This was a thinly disguised reworking of the Mincemeat saga and Duff Cooper countered claims that he had betrayed official secrets by insisting that he had every right to recycle information that the former prime minister had been dining out on since 1945.

Duff Cooper's tome is still in print. As is Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was, whose title was borrowed by Spike Milligan for three episodes of The Goon Show. The 1953 rendition has been lost, but the 1956 version (which was co-scripted by Larry Stephens) and the 1958 revisitation still exist and make reference to the fact that Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers all served during the war. They also include a great shepherd's pie joke.

One suspects that screenwriter Ernest Lehman had seen Ronald Neame's film, as he borrowed the concept of 'the man who never was' for Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959), in which advertising executive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) becomes involved in a Cold War conspiracy after being mistaken by thuggish agents for the entirely fictitious George Kaplan. Other writers duly followed suit.

Since Ben Macintyre published the book that inspired John Madden's feature, fellow historian Ian Colvin has also reopened the case in The Unknown Courier: The True Story of Operation Mincemeat (2016). He has also written a biography of Germany's top spymaster, Admiral Canaris, and a study of a genuine plane crash in Spanish waters, Flight 777: The Mystery of Leslie Howard (both 2020).

The star of films like Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion (1938) and Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), Leslie Howard was lost at sea on 1 June 1943 and his death was reported in The Times on the same day as that of Major William Martin. Despite rumours that the Luftwaffe had shot down his plane in the mistaken belief that it was carrying Winston Churchill, Howard seems to have been targeted to sap British morale and prevent the production of further propaganda triumphs like Pimpernel Smith (1941), The First of the Few (1942) and The Gentle Sex (1943), which Howard had directed.

Given the other eminently plausible theories swirling around this tragedy, it's somewhat surprising that no one has ever made a film about it. That said, documentarist Thomas Hamilton is reportedly expanding his 2016 short on the subject, The Mystery of Flight 777, to feature length. With luck, this will be released on disc so that Cinema Paradiso users can learn more.

Sadly, they're unlikely to see the SpitLip theatre company's gender-fluid musical, Operation Mincemeat (2019), in which Ewen Montagu was played by Natasha Hodgson, Charles Cholmondeley by David Cumming, Jean Leslie by Claire-Marie Hall and Hester Leggett by Jak Malone. Taking a leaf from Mel Brooks's The Producers (1967) and Susan Stroman's The Producers (2005), Donnacadh O'Briain's romp includes dancing Nazis, although they shake a leg to sea shanties, tangos and hip-hop rather than 'Springtime for Hitler'. Someone get this show on disc asap!