THE IMITATION GAME EXPOSES HOW A GAY CRYPTOGRAPHER SHORTENED WW2
Up to 1967, consensual sexual acts between male adults in Britain could result in two years of imprisonment. The most celebrated case is that of Oscar Wilde in 1895, whose health so declined in prison that died three years after his release. A lesser known case is that of mathematician Alan Turing. Similarly convicted in 1952 (though pardoned by Queen Elizabeth in 2013), Turing was offered hormonal therapy (chemical castration) instead of prison, the debilitating effects of which resulted in his suicide in 1954. (It is no coincidence that Sir John Wolfenden commissioned a report that year which upon completion in 1957 urged decriminalization.) The Imitation Game is a biopic of Turing (played by Alex Lawther as a boy, Benedict Cumberbatch as an adult) with more depth than an earlier effort, Enigma, which earned a Political Film Society nomination in 2001. With some shifting back and forth in time, the film focuses briefly on his schoolboy isolation because he was “different” in order to explain not only the origin of his gay consciousness and but also his fascination about cracking codes. But much more time is devoted to his contribution during World War II—how he shortened the war by two years and saved an estimated 14 million lives by developing the world’s first computer. Early in the film he applies to the army for the position of cryptographer, seeking to decode Enigma, the German code used for communication within the Wehrmacht that was regarded as unbreakable because changed daily. Turing’s eccentric genius is initially frustrated by his colleagues until he writes Winston Churchill for £100,000—no small amount even today—to build a device now known as a computer (but originally as the Turing Machine) and to head the effort to decipher messages from word patterns mathematically. Two overblown sideplots add to the enjoyment of the film—how Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) outshines male cryptographers and helps Turing, and how MI6 deliberately plants John Cairncross, a known Russian spy (Allen Leech), into the cryptanalyst team that is never expected to yield results until Turing comes along. Much of the film stresses the secrecy of his work, which precluded a complete biography of his life until publication of Allen Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, on which the film is based. Director Morten Tyldum has not only provided a feast of exposés but also a human rights saga, both of which prompt the Political Film Society to nominate him for awards as best film of 2014. The title of the film is based on Turing’s 1950 scholarly essay asking “Can machines think?,” a question posed to Turing in the film while under interrogation before his arrest. MH