2021   Netflix

Rated:  PG-13

Length:  2 hr  8min

Drama ~ Thriller ~ War

Directed by:  John Madden

Starring:  Colin Firth, Kelly Macdonald, Matthew Macfadyen, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn and Jason Isaacs.

“We’re going to play a humiliating trick on Hitler.”

The Book:

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory by Ben Macintyre – April 5, 2011.

                      NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER                            NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING COLIN FIRTH    

The “brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker) true story of the most successful—and certainly the strangest—deception carried out in World War II, from the acclaimed author of The Spy and the Traitor.

Near the end of World War II, two British naval officers came up with a brilliant and slightly mad scheme to mislead the Nazi armies about where the Allies would attack southern Europe. To carry out the plan, they would have to rely on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. Ben Macintyre’s dazzling, critically acclaimed bestseller chronicles the extraordinary story of what happened after British officials planted this dead body—outfitted in a British military uniform with a briefcase containing false intelligence documents—in Nazi territory, and how this secret mission fooled Hitler into changing military positioning, paving the way for the Allies’ drive to victory.

The Movie (Warner Brothers UK Website):

It’s 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe, and plan to launch an all-out assault on Sicily; but they face an impossible challenge – how to protect the invasion force from potential annihilation.  It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) to dream the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the war – centered on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. Operation Mincemeat is the extraordinary and true story of an idea that hoped to turn the tide for the Allies – taking impossibly high risks, defying logic,  and testing the nerves of its creators to breaking point.

The Review:

I have seen this movie a few times and just watched it again. It is a remarkable story, hard to believe that MI5 and British Intelligence concocted this plan and set it into motion. And better yet, that the plan worked, fooled Hitler and changed the course of the war. It is very similar to The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, the story and the movie. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was based on MI5’s Operation Postmaster which occurred in January 1942. Operation Mincemeat occurred in April 1943. Both British Intelligence Operations that were highly successful in spite of all the odds. I find it completely fascinating how deceptions in special operations were carried out in WWII that ultimately helped defeat Hitler and The Nazi regime.

I wondered how many Operations there were like Postmaster and Mincemeat. Wikipedia has the answer….a lot. Here is the link if you’re interested: OPERATIONS. So just to wrap up Operation Mincemeat: They took a dead body from the city morgue with no apparent family ties and fabricated a background story on him. His service in the military, his social life, family, a girlfriend (they used a photo from one of the secretaries involved in the operation to stick in his pocket). They dressed him up in a Major’s uniform, loaded his briefcase with false attack plans and used a submarine to sneak in off the coast of Spain. They then dropped his body in the water close to shore so someone would find him on the shore and take him to the Nazis.

Ian Fleming, played by Johnny Flynn in this movie, is another interesting look at the role he played in British Intelligence’s role in WWII. Ian Fleming also appears in The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare and was involved in that Operation behind the scenes. In both movies you can see him constantly at his typewriter writing on his fiction work. He would later write the James Bond series of Books that later became a very popular worldwide Movie Franchise. He created 007 and you can see in the movies where he got the influences for his characters. They were inspired by the real men and women doing the dirty work of the covert operations in WWII. Fascinating stuff.

I think it’s a great story and a great movie, well done by the Netflix folks. Colin Firth, Matthew Macfayden and Jason Issacs all did great jobs in this. Simon Russell Beale was a very believable Churchill and I really liked Kelly Macdonald as Jean Leslie. I remember her from Boardwalk Empire, I’m a fan of that series. This is a good war movie without much of the violence and bloodshed, more of a secret agent spy covert operation movie.

Yes, this is a good one, you should watch it.

Two Thumbs Up!