How did a corpse washing up on a beach help change the course of World War II?
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It was no ordinary corpse.
And it was no random occurrence, but part of a carefully planned, high-risk British military intelligence operation aimed at deceiving the Nazis and saving thousands of lives.
Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), tells the story of how this plan was conceived and executed and what happened what it was put into action.
And it shows us something of the men and women who were involved.
The film is set in 1943. The British government has promised the US government that the Allies will invade Sicily by June, but it's considered an obvious target the Nazis will be ready to defend.
The Twenty Committee - also known as the XX (double-cross) Committee - is charged with devising a way to trick Germany into believing the invasion will be of Greece, not Sicily. Cholmondeley's idea involving a dead body is chosen.
Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen), along with Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming (Johnny Flynn) set the plan in motion. They obtain the corpse of Glyndwr Michael, a vagrant who poisoned himself, and devise a false identity for him as Major William Martin, with a backstory, letters, a photo of his "fiancee" and, of course, the all-important fake invasion plans.
But there are romantic and personal issues at play. Both Montagu - whose family has moved to the US for safety - and Cholmondeley have feelings for widowed secretary Joan Leslie (Kelly MacDonald) - who posed for the photo of the "fiancee", Pam.
In exchange for an official favour, Cholmondeley, agrees to spy on Montagu, whose brother who is suspected of being a Communist and thus a security risk.
And the possibility of the plan being leaked is always present.
Madden, 73, was born in 1949 and says when he was growing up, the shadow of World War II loomed large.
Montagu wrote a book about the operation, The Man Who Never Was (1953) - adapted into a 1956 starring Clifton Webb - but he was not permitted to reveal many aspects of what went on, including the identity of the body.
"Cholmondeley was extremely reticent - he didn't like to talk about the plan," Madden says.
"He didn't approve of Montagu's book and insisted that he not be part of the film."
Madden says that in part because of the secrets and unanswered questions, Operation Mincemeat achieved something of the status of an urban myth.
Writer Ben MacIntyre was able to use documents declassified in 1996 to paint a fuller picture of the story in his 2010 book Operation Mincemeat.
Madden says that book came on his radar when American screenwriter Michelle Ashford, with whom he was working on the TV series Masters of Sex, read about it.
Firth, a friend of Madden's, committed to the project and financing began to be arranged through pre-sales at Cannes in 2019.
Because it was hard to categorise, with a number of different elements, no American pre-sales were made: Netflix picked the film up when it was completed.
This story about creating a story has interesting layers, since the film, in its combination of fact, dramatisation and conjecture, echoed the creation of "William Martin" and his purpose.
"It very much reflects itself in the process of creating another fiction" - as, indeed, did Shakespeare in Love, to more comedic effect.
Not that the filmmakers went out of their way to make things up for the movie.
"I would say of what we have that very largely it is true," Madden says, while acknowledging that "not every aspect of it is what we would accept as true and verifiable".
The inclusion of Ian Fleming was not fiction: the creator of James Bond was indeed part of the operation and there are sly allusions to what he will do in the future.
Although the centre of the story is the operation itself but Madden wanted to move the film beyond the "procedural" level and look at the relationships and personalities of the characters.
"Montagu and Jean called each other 'Bill' and 'Pam' - they referred to each other in exactly that way," he says.
Whether this was a running joke referring to the made-up identities or an expression of deeper feelings is less certain.
Madden was inspired in the character side of the film by stories his stepmother, reminiscent of the doomed romance in the David Lean film Brief Encounter and of families separated - temporarily or permanently - by war.
And there's the moral quandary about exploiting someone's corpse even for an arguably noble purpose, a point driven home when the planners encounter a relative of the dead man.
Operation Mincemeat was also, for Madden, "a chance to look at a world you don't very often see in London in this period".
In 1943, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain were over and people were going out again at night, albeit with torches pointing towards the ground, just in case. This isn't about air raid sirens and bomb shelters and smoking ruins, but about clubs and drinks and dancing, people finding some diversion in a difficult situation.
And although this is a World War II film, it's not about carnage: there are plenty of films dealing with battles such as D-Day and Normandy.
Asked about his next project, Madden doesn't want to say much, saying he is "superstitious". An internet search suggests the project is about Joan Quigley, astrologer to US president Ronald Reagan's wife Nancy.
There are sure to be some secrets revealed there.
Operation Mincemeat is now in cinemas.