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Man Who Never Was (20thCentury-Fox). One morning in the spring of 1943, the body of a man in the uniform of the Royal Marines was washed ashore on the coast of Spain. He carried valuable papers indicating that the next Allied thrust was to be in Greece rather than Sicily. Would the Germans get this skillfully planted misinformation? If they did, would they act on it?
They would and did, and British intelligence pulled off what was probably the major espionage coup of World War II. Based on the 1954 book by Ewen Montagu (TIME, Feb. 1, 1954), who masterminded the actual hoax, the film is largely faithful to its engrossing true story. Its chief flaw is some romantic embroidery concerning Gloria Grahame, who is done a bad turn both by the scriptwriter and the makeup man (she often looks as if she had been doused in oil for a Channel swim). An extra helping of thrills was also tacked on to make the Nazis seem less gullible than they actually were.
Clifton Webb sheds every trace of his Mr. Belvedere mannerisms to give a terse performance as Montagu, the intelligence officer who has more trouble selling his own high command than he does in hoodwinking the Germans. His toughest job is finding a proper body: that of a man of military age who has just died of pneumonia—so there will be enough fluid in the lungs to fool a Spanish prosector into believing the man has drowned. So long as the film remains a documentary, its detail is fascinating, whether it is the slow building of a personality and past life for the dead man or the grisly task of dressing the corpse in a hospital cellar as German bombs rain down. Stephen Boyd, as an Irish agent of the Nazis, gives some plausibility to the fictitious counterespionage sequence that ends the film, but Producer Andre Hakim would have been better advised to stick to the original story.