2020 Drama, War – 128 mins, Cert 12A
Director: John Madden
Starring: Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Johnny Flynn, Jason Isaacs
It’s 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe and plan an all-out assault on Sicily; but they face an impossible challenge – how to protect a massive invasion force from potential massacre. It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) to dream up 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 alter the course of the war defying logic, risking thousands of lives and testing the nerves of its creators to breaking point.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT, In the context of WW2 narratives the story of Operation Mincemeat is unique: a bizarre and seductive blend of high-level espionage and ingenious fiction, where the stakes could hardly be higher. The scheme was 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 non-existent 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.
Screen writer Michelle Ashford’s adaptation of the non-fiction bestseller by Ben Macintyre fuses multiple strands and moods: tense, romantic, thrilling, unexpectedly funny, and endlessly surprising. It tells a richly human story of the soldiers we seldom see, who fight a different kind of war in shadows and deception, haunted by the knowledge that certainty and guarantee of success are nowhere to be found.
Click here to read about Operation Mincemeat on IMDb
Bookings – Email: filmnight@rockbournevillagehall.org.uk
Phone: Lucy Matthews – 01725 518695
Doors open @ 7.00pm – Film @ 7.30pm Cost £6
Supper @ 9.40pm Cost £7, wine £12 per bottle
Last bookings @ 12.00 Sunday 16 October 2022
Dates for your diary:
November Film – Where the Crawdads Sing – Wednesday 16 November 2022
In order to do all we can to protect our audiences we ask all attendees to please take a lateral flow test on the day of the Film and not to attend should it prove positive.