British spy drama Operation Mincemeat opened in theaters in April 2022, and just like the real-life operation whose story it retells, it’s been a roaring success. Director John Madden tells the story of WWII British intelligence operatives passing off false information to the Nazis by acquiring an unclaimed corpse and dressing him up as a Royal Navy officer, planting false documents on him, and setting him adrift off the coast of Spain. Spanish officials were convinced to share the documents with Nazi Germany before returning them to the British.
Thanks to this deception, German forces withdrew their forces from Sicily to reinforce Greece and Sardinia, leaving the ill-equipped Italian army to defend Sicily alone from an Allied invasion. The Allies won with minimal loss of life thanks to Operation Mincemeat, and their victory led to Benito Mussolini’s loss of power and subsequent arrest. The story of Operation Mincemeat has been made into books, the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, and even a musical, and now in 2022, a critically acclaimed film based on the fully declassified operation.
Front and center is Naval intelligence officer Ewen Montagu, played by veteran actor Colin Firth, best known for his arresting performance as Mr. Darcy in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. He’s joined by Matthew Macfayden, who coincidentally also played Mr. Darcy in the 2005 adaptation, as Montagu’s close colleague Charles Cholmondeley. Both men have traded the flowy shirts, tight pants, and smoldering gazes of the romantic lead for straightlaced officer uniforms and serious expressions. However, if that’s what gets your heart pumping, here are ten more films featuring intense spy drama in historical settings.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Equal parts spy thriller and irreverent action film, Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino at his demented best. It tells an alternate version of WWII history centered on a squad of Jewish-American commandos led by Aldo Raine (played by Brad Pitt) who hatch a daring plot to kill Hitler himself. Their plan collides with that of a Jewish woman, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who plans to take her own vengeance on the Nazis for the murder of her family. The cat-and-mouse interplay between Raine, Dreyfus, and Christoph Waltz’s urbane and psychopathic Nazi officer Hans Landa is a great balance for the over-the-top bloody action that Tarantino is known for.
The Imitation Game (2014)
Director Morten Tyldum brings the story of WWII master codebreaker Alan Turing to life on the big screen, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the lead role. In The Imitation Game, Cumberbatch draws heavily from his portrayal of the titular detective in 2010’s Sherlock TV series. His Turing is both highly intelligent and socially abrasive, though when he helps an equally intelligent young woman, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), join the codebreaking team against the wishes of her parents, she helps him integrate with his team in turn and so Turing wins their loyalty. That loyalty is tested by the complications of wartime intelligence, the discovery of a Soviet spy, and the discovery of Turing’s homosexuality, which was still illegal in the UK at the time. Turing’s story ends in tragedy, but the movie’s thesis is encapsulated in its ending scene, wherein an older Clarke points to Turing’s legacy of millions of lives saved due to his work.
The Courier (2021)
Another film based on real-life events led by Benedict Cumberbatch, The Courier sees him as British businessman Greville Wynne, who is approached by MI6 and CIA agents with a plan to send him to Soviet Russia as an intelligence operative during the Cold War. The mission has him meeting and making friends with Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a high-level Soviet official whose betrayal of the Soviet government has less to do with money than a deep-felt responsibility. The film is a slow burn, told through the lens of Greville’s relationships with both Oleg and his wife Sheila (Jessica Buckley). It’s both a spycraft-as-building-relationships tale and an exploration of how such experiences change their participants.
Munich - The Edge of War (2021)
Taking place on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Munich - The Edge of War documents the efforts of two men, English secretary Hugh Legat (George MacKay) and German translator Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner), as they race to gather and present enough evidence for then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons) to be convinced not to sign a peace agreement with Hitler. With no formal training in spycraft and with Nazi officers on their trail, the two men are in near-constant danger. Their plan ultimately fails, true to history, but the point is not to tell a story in which the good guys win but to create a snapshot of the conflicting moods of the time, and at that, Munich succeeds.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Considered one of cinema’s modern classics, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a masterclass in slow-burn historical spy dramas. It centers on George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a former MI6 agent who is secretly pulled out of retirement to bring his years of expertise to bear against a suspected mole in the organization. Among those under suspicion is Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), alias “Tinker”, Smiley’s former boss, who originally ousted him in the name of modernization; also among the suspected are Bill Hayden (Colin Firth), alias “Tailor”, Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), alias “Soldier”, and eventually Smiley himself, alias “Spy.” The investigation is an agonizingly slow simmer of paranoia, but the payoff is worth the pain, making this one of the best spy movies of this century.
Argo (2012)
Ben Affleck’s third directorial project tells the story of a team of Canadian and American intelligence agents who travel to Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis to rescue the sixty-six members of the American embassy staff being held captive. Their cover story: they are location scouts for a fake science-fiction film called Argo. Affleck’s lead character, Tony Mendez, poses as the producer for the film, putting his own life on the line to make contact with the hostages and provide them with Canadian passports. The mission is under threat both from the Islamist revolutionaries and from the American government, who pull support at a critical moment and force Mendez to make a dangerous choice. Although the film drew criticism for taking credit away from the Canadian agents who were the main drivers of the real-life operation on which the movie is based, the film itself is both a powerful piece of cinema and an intriguing look into one of the most frightening moments of world history in living memory.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
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Nearly a decade after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, orchestrator Osama Bin Laden was finally brought to justice of a sort, killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan. The event was a culmination of years of painstaking labor by the CIA. It is this story that director Kathryn Bigelow endeavors to tell in Zero Dark Thirty, with Jessica Chastain starring as CIA intelligence analyst Maya Harris. Harris is witness to torture, suicide bombings, and the corruption the CIA must feed to obtain information, but her skill, training, and willingness to put her own life on the line ultimately carries the investigation to its bloody, decisive conclusion.
Bridge of Spies (2015)
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Tom Hanks stars as an American lawyer tasked with negotiating prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union in Bridge of Spies, a Steven Spielberg-directed film steeped in Cold War intrigue. Hanks, as insurance lawyer James B. Donovan, has already shredded his reputation in the eyes of the American public due to his principled defense of convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), but it is those principles that causes the Soviet government to reach out to him when they want to negotiate a prisoner exchange for an American spy plane pilot in their custody. The subsequent negotiations in an East Berlin newly trapped behind the Berlin Wall are a test of Donovan’s nerves and negotiation skills as well as his principles as a lawyer and American citizen.
Official Secrets (2019)
Keira Knightley returns to the world of historical intelligence drama in Official Secrets as Katharine Gun, the whistleblower who revealed the joint American and British spying operation that targeted members of the United Nations for potential blackmail on the eve of the Iraq War. Her attempt to keep the UK from being led into war under false pretenses sees her charged under the Official Secrets act, with prosecutor Ken Macdonald (Jeremy Northam) assigned to her trial. Keira’s performance as Katharine carries the film in a powerful statement about a story that, in the words of Jordanian-Palestinian political activist Sam Husseini in an article about the film, “still isn’t really over.”
Valkyrie (2008)
Directed by Bryan Singer, Valkyrie takes on the desperate, ultimately doomed July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler conceived by some of the officers in his own army. Tom Cruise takes the lead as Colonel von Stauffenberg, who while recovering from an injury sustained in Tusinia is recruited by General Friedrich Olbrecht (Bill Nighy) into a conspiracy to kill Hitler and use the military protocol Operation Valkyrie to stage a military takeover of the country. The plan, despite being conceived by a group of competent military officers, is bedeviled by setbacks and unlucky coincidences at every turn - bombs fail to go off, communication breaks down, and ultimately Hitler remains in power for another year. The names of the conspirators, however, are memorialized to this day, and the cast and crew of Valkyrie also contribute to keeping the memory of von Stauffenberg and the other brave men of the July 1944 conspiracy alive.