Trailer
Plot summary
The German navy switches a codebook its U-boats use, and in March 1943 the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park lose their reading of the Shark cipher and with it the flow of naval intelligence. Tom Jericho, a Cambridge mathematician, comes back to the park after a month recovering from a breakdown caused by his affair with a colleague, Claire Romilly. He wants to see her and hears that she vanished days earlier. Her housemate, Hester Wallace, helps him follow the clues she left behind. They examine the intercepts Claire took and ask why she wanted them, while an MI5 agent named Wigram keeps Tom under watch.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Enigma (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was produced by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, who also makes a cameo as an RAF officer at a dance and lent the design department a four-rotor Enigma encoding machine he owned, to ensure the historical accuracy of one of the props.
- Three men actually retrieved the books from the U-boat U-559 on 30 October 1942: First Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier, who both drowned and were awarded the George Cross posthumously, and 16-year-old canteen hand Tommy Brown, who survived only to die in a house fire before the war ended.
- The historian Norman Davies argues that the film's fictitious traitor turns out to be Polish while only slight mention is made of prewar Polish Cipher Bureau cryptologists' contributions to Enigma decryption, when the only known traitor at Bletchley Park was British spy John Cairncross, who passed secrets to the Soviet Union.
