Operation Cicero
Dedicated to my nurse Moon, an ideal woman.
It runs barely over an hour, made with just what was needed, and it is one of the most celebrated espionage cases of World War II — one that, in large part, remains a mystery, despite the book the man at the center of it all wrote to tell his own story.
They called him Cicero — this most discreet butler to the British Ambassador in Ankara, who passed top-secret information to the Germans during the war. Joseph L. Mankiewicz based his film adaptation less on that account and more on the memoir written by the American military attaché at the German embassy, Franz von Papen.
Operation Cicero was the last screenplay Michael Wilson brought to the screen before landing on the blacklists of McCarthyism. He was nominated for an Oscar alongside Mankiewicz for this work, but it did him little good: from this point on he could only work on “Salt of the Earth” (La sal de la tierra) and lend a hand on “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Lawrence of Arabia.”
It isn’t hard to guess who steered Mankiewicz toward this espionage case, in which the villains seem like the good guys — something quite unusual in a moment of such patriotic fervor. Mankiewicz was intrigued by unusual destinies and unconventional trajectories. The foundation of his craft is the screenplay: those dialogues he rewrote again and again to achieve maximum concision and punch. From that base he could embroider characters, scenes, moments — and deliver a full masterclass in irony, with help from Hitchcock’s composer, Bernard Herrmann.
The British James Mason, 43 years old and as enigmatic as he’d ever been, launches his career here; for his next role he reunites with Mankiewicz in “Julius Caesar,” and “A Star Is Born” follows shortly after.
Danielle Darrieux plays the countess — a character, by the way, they invented out of thin air to add some pull to the story. This is one of only two films the French actress made in Hollywood, and in this case shot in Turkey, where the crew spent seven weeks on location.
The five fingers of the original English title were a distributor’s invention, designed to suggest greed — a piece of nonsense that served as the basis for the film’s advertising campaign and that put the meticulous director of “Operation Cicero” in a very bad mood whenever anyone brought it up.
Don’t miss it. It has some wonderfully entertaining moments.