Movie Details
| Title: | The Man Who Never Was | |
| Director: | Ronald Neame | |
| Year: | 1956 | |
| Genre: | Military Drama | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 08.27.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- Gambit
- The Poseidon Adventure
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 08.27.06 | Netflix | Truth be told, I added this to my netflix queue so long ago that I don't remember how I even heard about it, and had no clue what it was about or who was in it or what when it came in the mail... sometimes that's cool though... I must've had some curiosity toward it or I wouldn't've added it in the first place, right? As it turns out, it was a pretty cool movie... albeit with one major flaw. It's based on a true story of how the British tried to fool Nazi Germany into reallocating some of their defenses away from Sicily before the big invasion... a mission which they accomplish by planting false documents on a dead body and dumping in the ocean to be found in Spain. The trouble comes during the last 45 minutes or so of the movie when Germany sends a spy back to London to check the authenticity of this dead body based on the personal articles and trinkets found on his person. It would almost be tense if they didn't say at the beginning of the movie that this was, except for a few changed names, absolutely true... and we all know they don't make movies about failed attempts very often. Still, it's cool to see the attention to detail that Clifton Webb and his little team of intelligence schemers stick to in creating this fictional Major and getting him ready to be accidentally found, even if you already know they get away with it. Maybe it's just from seeing it on my relatively small screen, but it looks like this was shot with an early scope lens because there's pretty noticeable distortion going on around the edges of the frame and the director chose to use lots of pans, zooms, and otherwise dynamic shots which kind of played with my perception a bit. That coupled with the sheer amount of dissolves sent out to a cheap lab that didn't match the color made it kind of distracting to me at times... but oh well, at least I could always tell what was going on unlike fight scenes today. All in all I was pretty pleasantly surprised with this... It went a lot quicker than I thought it would and delivered a pretty solid little story exploring a tiny detail in the huge machine of WWII. |
