Who better to make mincemeat of forces threatening Britain than a pair of actors known for playing Fitzwilliam Darcy, one of England’s most enduring bachelors?
Both Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen have played Mr Darcy, in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries and in the 2005 film respectively. Now they’re teaming up to play the men behind Operation Mincemeat, a stranger-than-fiction WWII military plot where false documents were planted on a corpse to confound the Nazis.
Operation Mincemeat is playing in Australian cinemas right now, from May 12, after screening far earlier at Palace’s British Film Festival last year. It’s directed by John Madden, best known for the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love and the cute Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies.
As intelligence officers Montegu and Cholmondeley, Firth and Macfadyen take on the ethically questionable task of planting fake Allied intel on a disguised corpse, leaving it to be found by Nazi spies. The oblivious forces would then be lead to believe that the UK was planning to attack southern Europe by way of Greece, rather than their real target of Sicily.
David Michael Brown included Operation Mincemeat among his selections for the best movies coming to cinemas in May, calling it “a boy’s own espionage adventure” that “takes a little known story and gives two of the unsung heroes of the war the lip service they deserve.”
In the trailer above, Firth calls the whole ordeal a “humiliating trick” for the Nazis, suggesting that the scheme is as much a dastardly tactical move as it is a demoralising one. Operation Mincemeat is the only way to see whether the Allies pull it off in glorious cinematic dramatisation, with some great moustaches and clipped accents to boot.
