Stiff upper lips abound in this stranger-than-fiction tale of second world war espionage, with Firth and Matthew Macfadyen in charge Operation Mincemeat was the bizarre real-life scheme cooked up by British intelligence in 1943 to fool Nazi Germany into thinking the allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia, rather than their actual target, Sicily. The corpse of a tramp was dressed up as fictitious “Capt William Martin” and carried elaborate bogus plans for this nonexistent invasion; the body was dumped into the sea so that it would wash up in Spain where the British were confident this phoney intelligence would be obediently passed to the Germans. Screenwriter Michelle Ashford has adapted the nonfiction bestseller by Ben Macintyre about this extraordinary adventure and John Madden directs, with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen playing the stiff upper lipped chaps in charge, Ewen Montagu and Charles Cholmondeley. And Johnny Flynn plays naval intelligence’s brightest spark: Lt Cdr Ian Fleming (the future creator of James Bond, who possibly had the idea in the first place) in an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek performance. Continue reading...
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