An inspired choice, then, for the location of the most shocking British film of the Second World War, a film intended as a rude wake-up for the nation.
Went the Day Well? was a British box office hit, released late in 1942. By the standards of the time, it was an extraordinarily graphic depiction of what might happen following a Nazi invasion of Britain. Some scenes – including a housewife attacking a man with an axe – still pack a punch today. Ealing Films, more famous for their comedies, produced the film and shot it on location at Turville, renamed as Bramley End.
The film tells the story of how a platoon of Nazi paratroopers is sent to soften things up ahead of a full-scale invasion of the UK. In June 1940, Germany really had drawn up plans to invade Britain, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. Went the Day Well? was deliberately intended to warn the UK populace that an invasion remained a possibility and that they must stay forever vigilant. It managed to deliver its warning positively and without scaremongering.
In the film, the invasion advance guard arrive mob-handed at Bramley End, disguised as British soldiers. Stationing themselves in the village, they’re warmly greeted by the unwitting locals (mainly women and children). The soldiers are especially welcomed, and aided, by the local squire – a Nazi insider who knows their real identity. Soon, however, the women of the village begin to note that all is not as it seems about these Tommies. A blink or you’ll miss it clue is the way that some of the squaddies write their numbers – in the Continental way, with a cross through the stem of a 7. Later, one of the soldiers publicly manhandles one of the kids. But what actually betrays the platoon is, of all things, a bar of chocolate.
‘Schokolade? Funny sort of way to spell chocolate,’ says a village boy on inspecting the legend stamped into the unwrapped bar. ‘Yes,’ chuckles his mother, ‘that’s the German spelling of…’ The camera holds on her face as the penny slowly drops.
Die katze is now out of the bag, so the Nazis must now brutally suppress the villagers before anyone can escape and warn the real British army based some miles away. The women, children and pensioners of the village manage to mobilise and fight back, the action concluding at the manor house with a horrific shoot-out that could go either way.
Throughout the conflict, the Nazis remain in British khaki uniforms. Had the events depicted really have taken place, the soldiers would have been contravening both the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions. Both state that it’s legal for soldiers to be disguised in their enemy’s uniform, but add that it’s a war crime to go into combat without first removing that uniform and replacing it with their own.
Some in authority worried that the film would cause panic – especially as Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti drew on his background in documentary filmmaking to give parts of the film an almost fly-on-the-wall edge. Still, with average weekly cinema audiences of 19 million in 1939 – growing to more than 30 million by 1945 – that was a lot of civilians being alerted to the fact that any moment they might be called on to fight German soldiers, tooth and claw, outside Lyon’s Corner House on the High Street.
As it turned out, the message of Went the Day Well? – to practice vigilance at all times – fell by the wayside. The threat of Operation Sea Lion had significantly waned by the time the film was released. Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union – starting with Operation Barbarossa – took precedence and was proving to be a costly mistake.
The film, though, remains a fascinating document of the times, and still has the power to shock. It was to prove the catalyst for many British films and books that dealt with the question of what would happen if the Nazis had invaded.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks did it with songs in 1971 (see page 64), but the1976 blockbuster The Eagle Has Landed is, to all intents and purposes, a remake of Went the Day Well? with a bigger budget and a couple of plot differences. Filmed at the beautiful village of Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, it’s the story of German soldiers, led by Michael Caine, who are not an invasion force but simply ordinary squaddies (most definitely not Nazis) sent on a regular suicide mission to kidnap Churchill. They stick to the Geneva Conventions by removing their Polish uniforms when one of their number dies after saving a child caught in a waterwheel.
Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB took the invasion to London and is a far less plucky – and more historically accurate – vision. The south of Britain is now under the jackboot, the rest of the nation will surely follow – and the round-ups have started. The stark choice is: collaborate, or die.
McCARTHY’S CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH CINEMA
In 1973 filmmaker Carl Foreman was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay Young Winston, the story of one of the great figures of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill. Given a CBE for services to the film industry, it symbolised his status as British cinema aristocracy. Not bad for a homesick American who had been exiled from Hollywood 20 years earlier, and had his American passport revoked.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, America was in the grip of an anti-communist witch-hunt lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Suspected communists faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), including leading names in Hollywood like Carl Foreman.
Foreman had been a member of the Communist Party in his youth but had left in 1941. Nonetheless the Committee ordered him to name other party members. He refused. That meant that he was blacklisted in Hollywood and his film career was over.
At the time he was working on High Noon, the powerful 1952 western about a town’s principled lawman forced to face a bloodthirsty gang, alone. The film would receive seven Oscar nominations (winning four, including Best Actor for Gary Cooper) and is generally regarded among critics and audiences alike as one of the greatest films ever made. Many can identify with the dilemma at the centre of the film on some level, but Foreman, who wrote it, also lived it. Says film critic Matthew Sweet:
High Noon is in a way a portrait of the turmoil in Carl Foreman’s life at that moment. Gary Cooper is the marshal of a town under threat from the imminent arrival of a gang of killers. He’s desperately trying to recruit deputies who’ll help him defend the town. He goes to the church and he discovers that the population gathered there, who he has protected in the last few years, don’t really want to help him. So this is a film about your friends not standing by you.
Some in Hollywood saw a message in High Noon they didn’t like. John Wayne called it the most ‘un-American thing’ he had ever seen. Matthew explains, ‘John Wayne looked at the last scene in the picture, where Gary Cooper throws down his marshal’s badge into the dust, and he saw that as a symbolic rejection of American values. It was an act too far for him.’
Facing the moral quandary of naming names in front of HUAC, Foreman left the USA in 1952. He headed for London to try and set up as a scriptwriter – but with a very heavy heart, says his son Jonathan Foreman.
He very much felt that he had been driven out. He knew, if he’d stayed, he wouldn’t be able to work at all. There he had been, in America, the sort of Quentin Tarrantino of his time, hugely successful, especially after High Noon, and then suddenly it was all taken away.
Even in Britain, the blacklisting meant he had to write under pseudonyms. When he co-wrote another cinematic classic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, his name was left off the credits. Foreman’s screenplay was based on the novel Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï, which was written by French author Pierre Boulle. In spite of his amused admission that he couldn’t even speak English, Boulle took the screenwriting credit so that Carl could avoid the blacklist.
Foreman’s most ambitious film was the epic The Guns of Navarone about an Allied
