Enigma (film)
The story takes place in March of 1943 with the Second World War at its height and is loosely based on actual events. The cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, England, have a problem: the Nazi U-boats have increased the security of key-changing of their Enigma machine ciphers, leading to a blackout in the flow of naval vital signals intelligence. This could spell disaster in the critical Battle of the Atlantic, on whose outcome Britain's survival depends. The British cryptanalysts have cracked the "shark" cipher before, and they need to do it again in order to keep track of U-boat locations and steer shipping convoys out of their way.
Tagline:10,000,000,000,000,000+ combinations - 24 hours to get it right
The plot follows the fictional character of the brilliant but maverick working class mathematician Tom Jericho (played by Dougray Scott). He is returned to Bletchley Park from Cambridge to assist with the crisis after a period of recuperation bought on by overwork earlier in the war combined with an unhappy love affair with Claire Romilly (Saffron Burrows), which led to his having a nervous breakdown. Jericho immediately tries to see Claire again and finds she has mysteriously disappeared. He enlists the help of Claire's blue stocking housemate Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet) to follow the trail of clues and learn what has happened to her. Mr. Jericho and Miss Wallace, as they coldly call each other, repeatedly break the rules of the Bletchley Park establishment and the law as their hunt gets more intense. Jericho is closely watched by MI5 agent Wigram (Jeremy Northam), who plays cat and mouse with him throughout the film. Jericho is tolerated at the Park, despite his transgressions, because of the brilliant plan he invents for uncovering the new key. The plan may unfortunately mean sacrificing at least one Allied convoy to the U-boats.
The film follows events as signals intelligence see a convoy spotted and then hunted down by the U-boats, but this gives enough information for the new key to be analysed using electro mechanical Bombe devices.
Tom and Hester at the same time in their unofficial research uncover a British government plot to bury the intelligence information of the Katyn massacre for fear it might weaken American willingness to remain in the war on the same side as Stalin.
This in turn leads to their
suspicion that a Polish cryptanalyst, Jozef 'Puck' Pukowski (Nikolaj Coster Waldau)
at the park may have been so incensed by his own learning of the massacre that
he is prepared to betray Bletchley's secrets to the Nazis in order to take revenge
on Stalin.
Cast
Dougray Scott - Thomas Jericho
Kate Winslet - Hester Wallace
Saffron Burrows - Claire
Jeremy Northam - Wigram
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau - Puck (as Nikolaj Coster Waldau)
Tom Hollander
- Logie
Donald Sumpter - Leveret
Matthew Macfadyen - Cave
Richard
Leaf - Baxter
Ian Felce - Proudfoot
Bohdan Poraj - Pinker
Paul
Rattray - Kingcome
Richard Katz - De Brooke
Tom Fisher - Upjohn
Robert Pugh - Skynner
During the film' premiere
in Edinburgh, Dougray Scott stayed for only fifteen minutes of the film –
he went to a nearby pub to watch a Scottish Premier League football match between
Rangers and his favourite team, Hibernian. And co-producer Mick Jagger stayed
away altogether.
When Tom Jericho is tapping on the desk with a pencil in
the film, he is spelling out "Claire" in Morse code.
When Hester
Wallace decodes the long list of Polish names the camera zooms in on the name
"Zygalski". Henryk Zygalski was a Polish mathematician who helped to
break Enigma designing the "perforated sheets" also known as "Zygalski
sheets".
The mansion in the film is not the real Bletchley Park mansion
– it was shot, instead, at Chicheley Hall.
Co-producer Mick Jagger of
the Rolling Stones rock group, makes a cameo appearance as a soldier in a bar.
He also lent the film's design department a four-rotor Enigma encoding machine
he owned – to ensure the historical accuracy of one of the props.
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