What makes it different from others?

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

It's the spring of 1943. North Africa has been taken and London is preparing to invade the obvious next step Sicily. It's too obvious and a diversion is needed. Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu of the Royal Navy comes up with a plan to plant a dead body on a Spanish beach. The body holds the fake identity of Royal Marine Major William Martin with plans to invade Greece. Time is short. Montagu's secretary Pam writes a love letter for the ruse with the help of her roommate Lucy Sherwood who just sent her boyfriend off to the front. They use Lucy's picture and name. The locals transfer the material to the Nazis and IRA Nazi spy Patrick O'Reilly is dispatched to London to confirm the dead man posing as his friend.The historical story is compelling. The fictionalization is a bit stiff. The planning and execution of the scheme is not the most thrilling. There is a lot of stiff upper lip acting. The last half has much more espionage thrills with the introduction of a Nazi spy. This could have worked better with a non-linear timeline. The preparation of each aspect of the scheme could be done in short flashbacks. The straight forward way of storytelling keeps the movie a bit stiff.

True story of a British attempt to trick the enemy into weakening Sicily's defenses before the 1943 attack, using a dead man with faked papers.I had heard of Operation Mincemeat, but did not really know much about it. How much is covered here is uncertain, and of course some elements are fictionalized (the father of the corpse, for example, is a completely invented figure). But this is just a fascinating story, and even when told in a semi-fictional sense, it demands a level of curiosity.I feel like the film is not well-known, and that is not surprising: it is devoid of any known actors, and the director is also unknown to me. Peter Sellers provides a voice, but without being credited, so that hardly counts.

The Man Who Never Was (1956)A straight up insider, realistic yet slick wide screen view of a particular British undercover mission in WWII. There, in one sentence, said it all. It's a very very good film, but depends on its ordinary flair to survive, which means its flair remains a bit ordinary. Some great acting, fast editing, and a final third with a surprise twist that keeps you really watching. And it's based on fact, which adds yet another tilt.I watched it at first because I wanted to see Gloria Grahame, who can be simply astonishing in her slightly off beat roles. And she comes through to a degree here--she doesn't have a lot of screen time, and her role is partly to be saucy (as usual) but partly to be upset and crying, which she does really well. I love the drama built into World War II, in any form, though combat films are less interesting than civilian ones to me, and this was mostly on the home front, London after the Blitz but while some overhead bombing was still apparently going on (it is heard in one scene).As a look at secret service work, or what might now be called a Special Ops mission, it's really quite believable. I suspect, being only a decade after the event happened, there was an attempt to make it honest, but beyond that, it feels honest. The people are determined and flawed and yet very smart and a little lucky. What seems like a turning point in the invasion of Europe by the Allies really seems to hinge on the intuition of one or two people, and the ad lib genius of one American girl on the spot (which I assume is fiction, but who knows?).If you want to relax but never be bored, this is a terrific movie. Though technically an American production, it's thoroughly British, from the source book to the cast to the setting, of course, in London. The British director was originally a cinematographer, which might account for the solid (if unsensational) visual sense of it all. It's not a breakthrough, moving, or memorable film, surely, but as high quality entertainment with a toe in important history it excels.

There is a book out this year (2010) by Ben Macintyre that sheds new light on Operation Mincemeat, based on some declassified documents. The movie does a good job of portraying the story for the screen. Macintyre reveals that the "body" that was dumped in the sea was a young impoverished Welsh coal minor who, either as suicide or out of hunger, ate some rat poison spread on bread in a London tenement as a vermin trap. When the body was recovered by the Spanish fisherman, the "papers" were almost given back to the British. They had to fabricate radio traffic on "compromised" lines to draw the attention of the Germans to the documents. "Oh, yoo-hoo! Look over here!" Lastly, the "papers" had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a Colonel in German intelligence who was a member of the German Resistance. He doubted their authenticity, but sold the Nazi hierarchy on their genuineness. He was hung by the SS in July of 1944 after the failed plot against Hitler.Just some interesting historical amplification for a fine 50-year old movie.