The Individual In History- Clifton Webb’s The Man Who Never Was

 

 

DVD Review

By Lester Lannon  

The Man Who Never Was, starring Clifton Webb , Gloria Grahame, 1956

No question war, especially World War II, is an especially fertile ground for thrillers, for the portrayal of the best laid plans of mice or men, going awry or not. Even better, again using World War II as the example, is the role that anonymous individual have in turning battles or other events one way or the other and turning history that way on a dime. Of course as in the film under review, The Man Who Never Was once even the most interesting real life plan has to be glossed enough to be audience-friendly and so certain liberties give the whole plot grander effect that the normal ho-hum of intelligence work really looks like. Ask your nearest clandestine spy and he or she will give you the real skinny.    

Here what is what on this one. The British (and Allies) after clearing North Africa and its environs of Jerries, oops German, by 1943 are ready to make their way to back to Europe by setting up a second front via Sicily and eventually to Italy and then eastward. The deal though is the Germans are entrenched on Sicily and elsewhere and since they are prepared for some kind of invasion from the South they would if at full strength make the Allied casualty lists even longer. So somebody in Naval Intelligence, a staff officer played by Clifton Webb last seen in this space trying to corner the Gene Tierney market in the film noir Laura, proposed the idea of trying to fake the Germans into thinking that the invasion was going to come through Greece, or elsewhere thus diverging those German divisions elsewhere. A hard trick to pull off, no question since the Germans had not conquered a good part of Europe by being duped by every harebrained scheme the enemy came up with. But our captain is clever and resourceful. Why not have a dead man “volunteer” (by his grieving but patriotic father) filled with war plans and personal items be washed up on the Spanish coast and see if the Germans buy the ruse. The rest of the film, and the film’s tension, revolves around getting everything right to fool the Germans from real letters to sales receipts from men’s clothing stores.

And it mainly works. But like I said the Germans were not born yesterday and so they sent a spy into Britain to get the scoop on this dead body. As the spy gets more information he becomes convinced that this plans found on the dead body are real. The icing on the cake, and the reason that Gloria Grahame last seen here in this space as a gangster’s moll in half the great B-noirs of the late 1940s and early 1950s, gets some top billing despite her small role is that when the spy goes to her to see her reaction to the death of the dead man who was supposed to be her fiancé she puts on a convincing demonstration for him, although she was mourning the fly-boy she was engaged to who was killed in a plane  crash. Nice twist. Nice to that an individual did have a small effect on the outcome of World War II with all the mass deaths and destruction.