Review of It Happened Here

Introduction

At first glance, this DVD release looks like one of those Hitler-porn programmes beloved of the History Channel and Discovery.

It Happened Here is the powerful feature drama-documentary debut of Film Historian Kevin Brownlow, who would go on to make Winstanley, the ground-breaking tv documentary series Hollywood (soon out on DVD), Universal Horror and important documentaries on Chaplin, Keaton, DW Griffith, Lon Chaney, "The Tramp And The Dictator" and most recently Garbo. He has also acted as historical advisor on a number of other documentaries about early Hollywood and restored the 1921 Abel Gance masterpiece Napoleon.

His theme for It Happened Here is unusually not film-related, but based on the what-if premise of what-if-the-Nazis-had-invaded-Britain-in-1940. The premise is carried off with startling effectiveness, made even more astonishing by the fact that Brownlow was only 19 when he started making the movie and his collaborator Andrew Mollo (writer of Winstanley, later to be art director on Xtro (1983), historical consultant on The Eagle Has Landed and Production Designer on the Sharpe and Hornblower series) was only 16. It took them eight years to finish the film, using a combination of professional and amateur actors. Pauline Murray, the lead actor, was a non-professional while Sebastian Shaw, who played Dr Richard Fletcher, is better known for playing the elderly Anakin Skywalker in Return of the Jedi (although his distinguished stage and screen career stretched back to 1930).

The movie was made at a time when war movies made no attempt to explain or validate their standpoint. The Allies were good guys, the British stiff-upper-lipped patriots and the Nazis goose-stepping morons with a mean streak a mile wide. Nobody attempted to explain National Socialism. Nobody even took the time to translate Hitler`s broadcasts, passing them off to the general public as the rantings of a potty house-painter. Brownlow and Mollo wanted to make a movie that would ask some serious questions and more importantly be immaculately accurate.

Not only did they achieve that accuracy, but surpassed it in that there are no wartime stock-shots. Everything was recreated and shot afresh. The fictitious "Immediate Action" Organisation included members of the British National Socialist movement, and in the discussion scene their comments were spontaneous and unscripted. This led to later problems when the finished project was sold to United Artists.

Very dark in tone, the movie is singularly uncompromising and the documentary style of filming overrides the occasionally awkward performances of the non-professional members of the cast. While now it may be viewed as an interesting philosophical exercise, at the time of its release the movie unleashed a semi-rabid reaction from critics used to war-themed movies that celebrated the stiff-upper-lippedness of the British with its suggestion that the British might not fight them on the beaches and on the landing grounds. Distributors United Artists bottled out of including the interview footage with actual British fascists airing their beliefs, and accusations of anti-Semitism were levelled at Brownlow and Mollo although the film was firmly anti-fascist.

The making of the movie is as interesting a saga as the movie itself, and Kevin Brownlow`s book on the subject, "How It Happened Here" has been republished by UKApress.com.

Video

Shot partly on 16mm and partly on 35mm, in black-and-white, the movie has a rough look to it that heightens the sense of realism. While Kevin Brownlow shot most of the 16mm footage himself, Peter Suschitsky is credited as the director of photography.

Audio

The audio is in DD2.0 Mono and includes a 1936 recording of notorious British Nazi Sir Oswald Moseley.

Features

The disc includes an original cut of the specially constructed newsreel footage. There is a trailer and stills galleries of the production and of occupied Paris. An introduction listed as an extra on the box turns out to be the printed insert for the box.

Conclusion

As directorial debuts go, this is quite an impressive one. It combines a grab-you-by-the-eyeballs premise with a sure-handedness of a much more seasoned director. Only the awkwardness of some of the amateur performers in the cast gives the game away.

I can appreciate that audiences of the mid-sixties might have found the idea of British collaboration with the Bosch a bitter pill to swallow, but being of that post-Dad`s Army generation familiar with family tales of spivs, rationing and pompous little bank-managers, I don`t find it such a stretch of the imagination. If anything it makes the French reaction to "collaborateurs" more savage and unreasoning.