- In 1943, the Allied forces were faced with a difficult problem. Suspecting an invasion of continental Europe through Sicily, the Axis powers had already set up the appropriate lines of defense. This left the Allies to choose between suffering great casualties by proceeding with the attack or moving their assault to a different, less strategically valuable location. But there was also a third option: fooling the enemy into thinking that they would strike elsewhere and then attacking Sicily as originally planned. They chose this latter approach, a great act of military disinformation that forms the basis of Ronald Neame's enjoyable The Man Who Never Was.
- So how to make the enemy think you're attacking where you aren't? Lt. George Acres (Robert Flemyng) half-jokes that they should plant false plans on a corpse and drop it out of a plane, but this gets Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu (Clifton Webb) thinking. What if there was some way to have the Nazis find a body appearing to be that of a secret courier? You couldn't drop one out of a plane -- corpses don't bleed the same way that live people do -- but perhaps you could toss one into the sea to make it look as though it had drowned. As a commanding officer (Laurence Naismith) blusters, "It's the most outrageous, disgusting, preposterous, not to say barbaric idea I've ever heard, but work out full details and get back to me in the morning!"
- But it turns out that finding a fresh drowning victim isn't as easy as you might think, particularly when you need the family's permission to release the body for reasons that you can't possibly explain. In the film's best scene, Montagu convinces a mourning father (Moultrie Kelsall) to permit his son to serve his country posthumously, assuring him that the body will be treated with respect. One imagines that the details of dumping a corpse into the ocean may not have sounded terribly respectful, but it is clear that Montagu is being completely sincere in his request. After a brief submarine excursion, the plan is put into effect and the Nazis seem to have taken the bait. Now there's just the small matter of convincing a German spy named O'Reilly (Stephen Boyd) that the late "Major William Martin" was a real person.
- While the idea of an Irish Nazi spy operating in London is interesting enough, the film quickly veers into regrettable territory when O'Reilly's investigates Lucy Sherwood (Gloria Grahame), a young woman whose boyfriend recently died in a plane crash. At the behest of Montagu's secretary Pam (Josephine Griffin), Lucy had helped to pen some fake love letters they planted on Martin's body, and now O'Reilly wants to make sure that the doting author of these letters really exists. While misunderstood love letters work wonders in comedies like Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, they are an obviously fictional and inappropriate addition to this otherwise historically reverential film. It also doesn't help that Grahame, a captivating actress who could do no wrong in her film noir roles, suffers from both miscasting and a distractingly bad makeup job. The rest of the movie is good enough that this misstep doesn't sink things completely, but just this once it would have been far more compelling to let such a fascinating true story speak for itself.
- Based on a true story and the book by the real Montagu, who also has a small cameo.
- Peter Sellers provides the voice of Winston Churchill, which is odd.
