Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by John Madden
Screenplay by Michelle Ashford
Book by Ben Macintyre

2022  (officially listed as 2021)
Now on Amazon Prime

CAST

Colin Firth – Ewan Montagu
Rufus Wright- Lt. Bill Jewell
Matthew Macfayden – Charles Cholmondeley
Ruby Bentall – Connie Bukes
Kelly MacDonald – Jean Leslie
Charlotte Hamblin – Patricia Trehearne
Jason Isaacs – Admiral Godfrey
Penelope Wilton – Hester Leggett
Johnny Flynn – Ian Fleming
Lorne MacFayden – Sgt Roger Dearborn / Glyndwr Michael
Mark Gattis – Ivor Montagu
Simon Rusell-Beale- Winston Churchill
Alex Jennings- John Masterman
Hattie Morahan – Hattie Montagu
Jonjo O’Neill- Teddy
Paul Ritter- Bentley Purchase
Will Keen – Salvador Gomez-Beare

We saw the trailer in the cinema, and it sounded like a major film. Then it wasn’t on long enough to see, and now it’s on Amazon Prime. £4.99 to rent (only weeks ago films were £3.49). £15.99 to “buy”. That’s more than the blu-ray disc will cost when it comes out.

We’re in World War Two as seen from the British point of view. Others may have had the sheer numbers of soldiers, but we had the boffins with the brains. Radar, Ultra, and cracking the Enigma code, the Supermarine Spitfire, Bouncing bombs, Decca FFS sound for submarine detection, early moves into computing. Unfortunately, as Patrick Bishop points out with Bomber Boys we then put all the lads with science A-levels into Bomber command, and lost a frighteningly high percentage of them, which is why we stopped having boffins with brains.

But never mind we had CUNNING PLANS. We put chaps into backrooms who were too old to fight, but (in this film) barristers, so bright and jolly decent. We had sparky intelligent well-spoken gals typing out stuff for them and coming up with good ideas. 

In this we have Colin Firth. I have no idea of the man’s political views but he has exuded quiet decency and authority in so many screen roles that he could stand for Prime Minister and do a Reagan (actor to leader) instantly. He looks particularly good in naval uniform as here.

As a film, it really does not need to be seen in a big cinema. We’re in poorly lit basement offices much of the time. There is no significant physical action. We don’t even go as far as the bombed-out buildings walk past beloved of British war films set in London. Not a barrage balloon in sight. At the end, the American landing craft sequences look ‘borrowed’ to me, though they might have had just the one. They did film at Saunton Beach in Devon and had a huge crew, so maybe it was filmed – you wouldn’t know.  The big sequences are night clubs and dancing.

Our cunning plans deceived the evil Huns. Plywood planes and trucks at Dover deceived the Germans into thinking our target was the Calais area for D-Day. So what’s the CUNNING PLAN here? (As with every film nowadays, this is a TRUE STORY.)  It’s fooling the Germans into thinking the Allied armies would move on from victory in North Africa to invading Axis territory from the Mediterranean. We needed them to believe the target was Greece rather than Sicily. Ah, you might think, why we would we invade Greece then struggle up the entire length of the Balkans to cross the Alps and invade the Third Reich? There was credibility, in that we would have relied on partisans in Greece and Yugoslavia for assistance.

Sicily was the shorter run, though it was invading Italy, an Axis power. As we had found in North Africa, the Italian army was less inclined to fight than the Germans. However the entire film misses the major reason for invading through Sicily which came out many years later. The Mafia hated Mussolini. Mussolini hated any other source of power. The deals were done in New Jersey, and the Mafia prepared the ground, supplied intelligence and assisted the American invasion. The payback was decades of entanglement between the CIA and the Mafia leading to a range of conspiracy theories… Cuba, Kennedy and Kennedy. That’s a better story, I suggest. But that’s the American point of view. Apart from the Mafia, there were partisans throughout Italy supporting the Allies. I know. A close friend’s English dad was in the invasion of Italy, and after fighting right up through Italy, met her Italian mum who was working for the partisans in the north. I’ve heard many tales.

So the CUNNING PLAN here is to find a corpse, and fill its pockets with the fake plans for the invasion via Greece. Then the plan is to dump the body off the Spanish coast, and rely on Franco’s Spain to pass the information on to Germany. They decide they need a complicated back story … love letters, photos in the pockets … rather than just a corpse with plans. They create an identity for the corpse, using a photo of Jean Leslie (Kelly MacDonald), which they name ‘Pam’. This leads to a romantic sub-plot between Ewan (Colin Firth) and Jean. Jean is a widow and Ewan’s family is in America for safety.

Charles also fancies Jean and is younger and unattached. This love triangle is not in any of the accounts, but propels the film nicely.

It’s a true story with real people and the plan really was code-named Operation Mincemeat. No plot spoilers, but we know the ending. In 1950 the cabinet minister Duff Cooper, who had worked on the team planning the operation,  published a novel version as Operation Heartbreak. Then the (real) Ewan Montagu wrote an account in 1953 which was filmed in 1956 as The Man Who Never Was.

The cast is top drawer British actors – with stage acting a speciality, especially Royal Shakespeare Company. Simon Russell-Beale as Churchill. Johnny Flynn is Ian Fleming … yes, the James Bond author who really did work on this project, and narrates parts of the story as he types away. Jonjo O’Neill is the suspicious character, Teddy (Last time I saw him he was playing Richard III in Stratford).  Penelope Wilton is Hester, an office manager of some kind. Ruby Bentall is another female employee on the team. Jason Isaacs is Admiral Godfrey, who first formulated the general idea. The added idea is to drop the corpse by submarine rather than the original cunning scheme of parachuting it down which could have ended messily. This involves a hair-raising drive to Scotland by van with the corpse so as to load it into a submarine. True story or not, one would have thought somewhere like Plymouth significantly more convenient for a submarine voyage to Spain with a decomposing body.

In the film, the two competing characters are Ewan Montagu, and Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfayden). It’s not just a competition for Jean’s affections. Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-LEE) has been told by Admiral Godfrey to watch Montagu, as his brother Ivor is a prominent communist. In return for spying, Godfrey will have his dead brother’s remains brought back from Bengal for burial. I still have a book by (the real) Ivor Montagu that was on my Political Studies reading list back in 1967, Germany’s New Nazis. He had been a film producer and started unionizing the film industry in the 1930s. He represented Britain in table tennis, and was eventually outed as working for Soviet Intelligence. Being awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959 was something of a giveaway.

It’s a good film for home viewing. A bit too darkly lit, perhaps – we normally keep on low side lights, but turned them off. I think they oversold it (given such a stellar cast) as a major film for big screens.