Oper­a­tion Mincemeat

Dur­ing my for­ma­tive years, before the nox­ious lure of cin­e­ma had enrap­tured and sub­se­quent­ly taint­ed my pure soul, I was a proud mem­ber of the Scout Asso­ci­a­tion. Each Fri­day evening, I’d don my badge-strewn faux-camo uni­form, dash to the rick­ety hut at the end of my street, and engage in what can only be described as whole­some outdoors‑y mon­keyshines, and play British Bulldog.

One of our Scout lead­ers was ex-mil­i­tary, wore avi­a­tor shades at all times and bore a strange resem­blance to Wal­ter from The Big Lebows­ki (and, by exten­sion, the gun-lov­ing writer/​director John Mil­ius). Often, in a peri­od of calm, gen­er­al­ly when we were con­sum­ing our tuck, he would invite us to gath­er round while he recount­ed – like a mas­ter sto­ry­teller – the plot of Richard Attenborough’s 1977 fea­ture, A Bridge too Far, about a failed Allied manœu­vre dur­ing World War Two involv­ing the strate­gic tak­ing of var­i­ous bridges in the Nether­lands. When he arrived at the trag­ic cli­max, he would often go silent and tear up. We would then go and play some more British Bulldog.

I can’t help but feel that the sim­i­lar­ly-inclined Scout lead­ers of today would glean much sat­is­fac­tion from recount­ing the sto­ry of Oper­a­tion Mince­meat, a long-odds gov­ern­ment escapade under­tak­en by a Naval Intel­li­gence offi­cer and an RAF Flight Lieu­tenant who had been sec­ond­ed to MI5 in order to trick Hitler’s Ger­many into think­ing an Allied land­ing par­ty would be arriv­ing in Greece rather than Sicily.

It has now been made into an entire­ly ser­vice­able peri­od thriller star­ring Col­in Firth as said puffy-chest­ed Naval offi­cer and Matthew Mac­fadyen as said book­ish RAF pilot who hatch a mad scheme involv­ing a dead Welsh­man, a cachet of fake papers, and lots of poten­tial Ger­man naïveté.

It’s all put togeth­er with a mea­sure of skill from old hand John Mad­den, and the tick­ing-clock essence of the ruse bun­dles the sto­ry in with plen­ty of ten­sion (even if you know the out­come). There’s a love inter­est thrown into the mix in the form of Kel­ly Mac­don­ald as a doe-eyed sec­re­tary who has been wid­owed by the war, and for whom both men take some­thing of a shine.

Jason Issacs is good val­ue as Admi­ral John God­frey, the preen­ing bureau­crat­ic over­seer whose hand is forced into com­mis­sion­ing this oper­a­tion and who secret­ly hopes it falls. A pan­tomim­ing Simon Rus­sell Beale is a sub-par Churchill among the pha­lanx of sub-par screen Churchills of yore.

It’s a mod­el of old school screen sto­ry­telling, where the robust indi­vid­ual ele­ments coa­lesce into the exact sum of their parts and not a sin­gle ounce out either way. There is an intrigu­ing meta­text when it comes to the cin­e­mat­ic notion of build­ing a per­son with a his­to­ry and emo­tions out of a rot­ting corpse and hop­ing that work­ing class peo­ple buy it, but the film is far more inter­est­ed in mak­ing sure all plot strands nice­ly weave in a sat­is­fy­ing way – and they do.

Even the alien­at­ing title makes a lot more sense when you get down to the nit­ty-grit­ty of what these peo­ple were actu­al­ly doing. Then, when it’s all done, you’ll be out the door in a flash and like­ly han­ker­ing for a swift round of British Bulldog.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

Sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism by becom­ing a mem­ber and receive month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions, exclu­sive essays and more.