The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 Second World War war film, based on the book with the same name by Ewen Montagu and dramatising actual events. It is about Operation 'Mincemeat', a 1943 British Intelligence plan to deceive the Axis powers into thinking Operation 'Husky', the Allied invasion of Sicily, would take place elsewhere.
The film was directed by Ronald Neame and starred Clifton Webb as Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Gloria Grahame as Lucy Sherwood, Robert Flemyng as Lt. George Acres, Josephine Griffin as Pam, Stephen Boyd as Patrick O'Reilly, Laurence Naismith as Adml. Cross, Geoffrey Keen as Gen. Nye, André Morell as Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Michael Hordern as Gen. Coburn and William Squire as submarine commander Bill Jewell. It was entered into the 1956 Cannes Film Festival.[1] Nigel Balchin's screenplay won the BAFTA for that year.
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Operation 'Mincemeat' involved the acquisition and dressing up of a human cadaver as a "Major William Martin, R.M." (born in Aberbargoed) and putting it into the sea near Huelva, Spain. Attached to the corpse was a brief-case containing fake letters falsely stating that the Allied attack would be against Sardinia and Greece rather than Sicily, the actual point of invasion. When the body was found, the Spanish Intelligence Service passed copies of the papers to the German Intelligence Service which passed them on to their High Command. The ruse was so successful that the Germans still believed that Sardinia and Greece were the intended objectives, weeks after the landings in Sicily had begun.
The screenplay of the film stayed as close to the truth as was convenient, with the remainder being fiction. For example, the Irish spy in the film is complete fabrication. Ewen Montagu declared that he was happy with the fictitious incidents which, although they didn't happen, may have happened. During filming, Montagu has a cameo role, that of an Air-Vice Marshall who has doubts over the feasibility of the proposed plan. It was described as a "surreal" moment when the real Montagu addresses his fictional persona, played by Webb.
The BBC's popular radio comedy show, The Goon Show, made a send-up of the story of The Man Who Never Was and incorporated most of the regular Goon Show characters. Written by Spike Milligan and Larry Stephens, it was broadcast on March 20, 1956 and remade later and broadcast on February 17, 1958. Coincidentally, Peter Sellers (one of the Goons) provided the voice of Winston Churchill in the film, although the character did not appear in The Goon Show adaptation.
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