The Story of Hitler's England (It Happened Here (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	It Happened Here (DVD)
Date:	25.04.06 (248 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A very convincing look at a fascist Britain

Disadvantages: The DVD is a bit of a disappointment

Seeing this little beauty released on DVD was a pleasant surprise. It’s not nearly as well known as it should be, and I feared that my old taped-off-the-telly VHS copy would have to suffice. But the digital revolution marches on, and while some classics are still frustratingly unavailable on DVD (Performance, to name but one), It Happened Here has been released for a whole new audience to enjoy. (Well, probably not, since no one’s heard of it, but you get the idea.)

It’s a kind of alternative history thing, painting a chillingly convincing picture of what Britain would have been like if the Second World War had turned out differently. Germany successfully invaded in 1940; the film is set in 1944. The resistance movement, backed by the Americans, is making headway in the South West, but otherwise, the whole country is firmly under the control of the Nazis.

There isn’t much plot to speak of. A district nurse, Pauline, is forcibly evacuated from her peaceful village due to partisan activity. Sent to London, she has to join the British fascist party (‘Immediate Action’) in order to get work. Although she has friends in the resistance movement, she makes the pragmatic decision to collaborate in order to live a life of relative comfort and usefulness. But she eventually finds a line that even she won’t cross.

The story, such as it is, isn’t really the point. Pauline is generally so passive that it’s hard to actually describe her as a character at all. She’s more a kind of everyman figure, representative of the silent majority, those who will meekly lower their heads and get on with life regardless of who makes the laws. It’s through her eyes that we witness what’s become of Britain under the jackboot, and what we see is very impressive.

Filmed in the 60s, when there were still enough unrepaired bombsites around London for it to work, It Happened Here presents an absolutely convincing and quietly terrifying picture of what would have happened if the English Channel wasn’t there. There tends to be a certain smugness in Britain about the fact that we weren’t conquered by Germany in the war – even today, 50 years later. The sad truth is that it was really only an accident of geography that prevented the invasion and, for all Churchill’s monumental rhetoric, it’s hard to imagine that the British would have fared much better than the French did.

Scenes of German troops parading through London, and cheerily visiting tourist spots, are great, and probably have the most immediate visual impact. But it’s the wealth of small details that really give the film its power. Political posters on buses, German road signs, the staggering lack of charisma of the British fascists, the beaten look of the people, the constantly expressed desire to get the country ‘back on its feet’ – what It Happened Here does, and does brilliantly, is turn Britain into a foreign country. It’s all too recognisable, but it’s horribly different. It doesn’t overplay the atrocities – there’s a very effective, brief glimpse of a Jewish ghetto, but the partisans are seen committing far more brutal acts than anything we see the fascists deal out. The most disturbing thing is the way the great mass of people are quietly acquiescent in whatever is decided for them, collaborating because, really, they don’t have any choice.

(The level of detail is so great that much of it went completely over my head. Apparently all military hardware and German army uniforms are genuine – I can’t say I’d have noticed if they weren’t, as all I know about such things comes from war films like Kelly’s Heroes. And I wouldn’t have known that a speech heard on the radio at one point was an actual Oswald Mosley speech if notes in the DVD package hadn’t told me. But I’m still impressed at the amount of detail that obviously went into making it all seem as true as possible.)

The film was made by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, and took seven years to complete. Incredibly, they were both teenagers when they started. Mollo seems to have gone into film design – I hadn’t heard of him otherwise. Brownlow is better known as an author and maker of documentaries about film history. (I particularly recommend his nice oral history of silent cinema, The Parade’s Gone By, and his more recent documentary about Universal horror films.) It Happened Here was extremely low budget, and it shows, but it’s shot almost like a documentary, so the slight air of amateurishness works in its favour, as does the rather dirty black and white photography. It’s generally well done – there’s a very well-edited pub fight, for instance. The most impressive single sequence is a newsreel we see about halfway through the film. Again, it’s completely convincing as a representation of the kind of propaganda you’d imagine Goebbels would have devised for a conquered Britain, and it’s also surprisingly impressive – you’re left wondering how on earth a no-budget, amateur film got to stage fake military parades in Trafalgar Square.

The cast are almost all non-professionals, which adds to the film’s realism; there are no showy performances here. The only actor in it, as far as I can tell, is Sebastian Shaw, who plays a friend of Pauline’s – an RSC stalwart in the 60s, Shaw is probably only remembered these days as being the guy under Darth Vader’s mask at the end of Return of the Jedi. Genuine British fascists appear in the film (and a gratifyingly unimpressive bunch they are, too) – there’s an improvised scene where, questioned by other characters, some of them explain their beliefs about the superiority of Aryans and so forth. They come across as silly rather than dangerous, even in this context.

This isn’t a particularly mind-blowing DVD. The picture and sound quality aren’t as pristine as they could be. There aren’t many extras, either. There’s a two-page leaflet explaining a bit about how the film was made. There’s a trailer, made by Universal, who distributed the film. (The budget for the trailer was apparently greater than that of the film.) The trailer is deceptive, making you think that this is an adventure film. There are some production stills – most of which are reprinted on the DVD cover or the leaflet – and some stills of Paris under the occupation, which inspired the look of the film. They’d be better with captions. And there’s a slightly longer version of the newsreel sequence, which is fine, but not really much more impressive than the version seen in the film.

But extras aside, this is well worth a look, and shouldn’t set you back too much (I got it for £10, but it’s almost certainly cheaper if you look around). It Happened Here is an extremely intelligent film about what life in a fascist Britain would have been like. As such, it makes V For Vendetta seem rather trivial. It makes you realise just how much of our current national identity is tied up in the war – our ‘finest hour’ – and makes you doubly grateful that things turned out the way they did.

Summary: A film deserving greater recognition.