I'm not sure that Went the Day Well? (1942) is a subtle movie, but it's so strange that it achieves nearly the same effect: I want to talk about it for hours in order to figure out what the hell it was that I just watched.
If you are familiar with Ealing Studios solely on the strength of its postwar comedies, especially the communal ones like Whisky Galore! (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949), or The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), Went the Day Well? is a little like one of those directed by Sam Peckinpah. In fact it was directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian-born self-described "surrealist with a tendency toward realism" as well as an eclectic background in architecture, interior design, and film in multiple countries and capacities, including set design for Marcel L'Herbier's visually groundbreaking L'Inhumaine (1924) and seven years as chief cook and bottle washer for the GPO Film Unit, e.g. Harry Watt and Basil Wright's Night Mail (1936). I have seen his name most often in connection with Ealing's horror anthology Dead of Night (1945), which I will undoubtedly watch sooner or later if only for Michael Redgrave. It would not be totally misleading to approach Went the Day Well? from a perspective of horror, but it is probably more fruitful to think of it in Cavalcanti's own terms. The Nazis had scrapped serious consideration of a full-scale invasion of the UK in the fall of 1940, but the specter lingered into the spring of 1942: it was an unlikely but not unrealistic thing for a British viewer to worry about. You would need a touch of the surrealist, however, to imagine that the German invasion would arrive in the guise of British Tommies, like being occupied by your own mirror universe. And however plausible or necessary it may be to posit that when ordinary, decent Britons finally galvanize themselves to grapple with their changeling invaders, they'll give as little quarter as they got, it's still a jolt when that determination involves a home-cooked meal, a pepper pot, and an axe.
According to the opening credits, Went the Day Well? was based on a 1940 short story by Graham Greene called "The Lieutenant Died Last," but as far as I can tell the screenplay by Ealing regulars John Dighton, Diana Morgan, and Angus MacPhail retains almost nothing of Greene's plot beyond the central idea of a small German force occupying a rural English village and a couple of professions and names. In a gesture as audaciously prophetic as the finale of Pimpernel Smith (1941), the entire film is framed in hindsight of an ultimate Allied victory, fondly recollected by the sexton (Mervyn Johns) who treats the camera as a friendly tourist; it is not that long since "old Hitler got what was coming to him" and the villagers are quite used to strangers arriving in their picturesque thirteenth-century churchyard to look at the white war memorial carved all over with German names: "They wanted England, these Jerries did—and this is the only bit they got." The date on the stone is May 25, 1942; the events which the sexton is about to relate were kept under strict government wraps until the war's end, when the newspapers retroactively christened that Whitsun weekend "the Battle of Bramley End." So we know from the start that bodies will hit the floor, but we don't know how thick and fast they'll do it. The early scenes are so pastoral, they're nearly parody. Here's the dear white-haired vicar (C.V. France) taking tea with his grown daughter (Valerie Taylor) who blushingly broadcasts her crush on "the leading light of our Home Guard" (Leslie Banks). Here's the publican's son (Frank Lawton) home from the Navy for his wedding to a spirited land girl (Elizabeth Allan) while the local poacher (Edward Rigby) drops them off a rabbit as a contraband gift. Here's the unflappable lady of the manor (Marie Lohr) and here's the gossipy postmistress (Muriel George) and here's the boldest of the London evacuees (Harry Fowler), Cockney chutzpah and all. There's sunshine and hedgerows and the clink of milk bottles and cuckoos lhudely singing until you can barely get a word in. Why shouldn't the narrative add a small convoy of Royal Engineers, dispatched to Bramley End for a vague "job of work" over the weekend? We already have the Home Guard, dutifully manning their observation posts and their machine guns and planning an exercise in the event of enemy paratroopers. Alas that the paratroopers have already landed and are the very men to whom the baker/OC (Ellis Irving) is proudly pointing out all his preparations. You begin to suspect uneasily that the invaders will not be the only Whitsun casualties buried around that stone.
These early sequences play most like conventional horror or suspense, with the audience all too urgently aware of the danger which the villagers are just fractionally too slow to detect in time; like black comedy, too, when one rough-tempered soldier is told roundly that he's "no better than a German" or the publican teases his newest customers that "We never had so many foreigners in the village before." The barricading of the lanes with barbed wire is briskly explained by the need "to put the village in a state of general defence," omitting the detail that the defending will need to be done against the British Army once the impostors begin their radio-jamming efforts in advance of the "airborne and seaborne invasion in force . . . to be launched Monday night." Discrepancies and peculiarities like a score sheet with all the numerals written in the Continental mode or a bar of Viennese chocolate stashed in a sapper's kit bag are either lost in the locals' effusive welcome or blocked outright by the mole in the village's midst, whose identity is no secret from the audience by the time the topic of fifth columnists is casually raised over dinner. There is no particular hurry to the reveal, either, which heightens the tension without any obvious stings or nudges. Sunday morning, the false soldiers make the rounds of the village to collect their fellows from their billets; they are seen off with jokes and sandwiches and even one parting kiss at the door, seemingly assimilated into the community overnight. We know this geniality can't go on indefinitely. By the end of Monday, unless there's some twist in store, all these laughing boys in bogus khaki are going to be dead, probably after trying to kill their equally cheery hosts. But we're well past the half-hour mark with no sign of hostilities, not even the accidental kind. How long can they keep it up? Don't they pose a real danger? Are we in some kind of gentle, plucky propaganda comedy after all?
Spoiler: we're not. Once the invaders reveal themselves, all bets are off in Bramley End. ( Well, I'm broadminded myself—and accidents will happen. )
I am not sure to what degree it's fair to consider Went the Day Well? as propaganda. I know it was made without official input from the Ministry of Information because Michael Balcon had burned bridges with them a few years previously; I also know that other Ealing films like The Big Blockade (1942) and The Next of Kin (1942) were produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the War Office, meaning he did not entirely spurn government commissions; and it is impossible for me to imagine that a film made smack in the middle of World War II in which the native grit and wit of rustic England successfully repel one Nazi invasion and prevent another would not have functioned as propaganda, whatever its formal genealogy. It becomes very slightly alternate history with its threatened amphibious invasion, but its events are otherwise scrupulously small-scale enough to have really happened. What then interests me about the movie is its message. Bramley End is not an especially allegorical village. Its inhabitants are not types beyond the usual small-town suspects. No individual action taken against the invaders succeeds with the force of the collaborative finale, but the deciding factor there is not so much a moral about team spirit as it is the practical absence of the character who could betray or divert their plans. And the film names the Nazis clearly as "forces of evil . . . the enemies and oppressors of mankind," but it offers little instruction for dealing with them beyond resist Nazis tooth and nail, even to your own death if necessary. Whatever you can do is worth doing. I admit there are worse takeaways from a 92-minute movie.
The title comes from an epitaph published in 1918 by John Maxwell Edmonds, who I am not surprised to read was a classical scholar who had previously translated Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" into Greek elegiacs, because the following is the sort of thing a person writes after exposure to Simonides' epitaph for the dead of Thermopylae:
Went the day well?
We died and never knew,
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
It may be, and I say this with affection and a little awe, the classiest thing about the movie. If films like The Moon Is Down and This Land Is Mine (1943) are prestige approaches to the themes of occupation and resistance, Went the Day Well? is the id-fueled pulp blackjack, a mess and an arguable masterpiece. I am reluctant to describe it as subversive only because it's so whack-a-ding-hoy that I'm not always sure what it's subverting, the answer in that case possibly being "What do you got?" I couldn't have dreamed it this weird and I'm so happy. It's full of heroic women and you can't be sure that the cute Cockney evacuee will survive the final reel any more than the courageous policeman or the incorrigible poacher. If you want to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis get theirs nastily, Cavalcanti and Ealing got there way ahead of Tarantino. This day brought to you by my proud backers at Patreon.
If you are familiar with Ealing Studios solely on the strength of its postwar comedies, especially the communal ones like Whisky Galore! (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949), or The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), Went the Day Well? is a little like one of those directed by Sam Peckinpah. In fact it was directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian-born self-described "surrealist with a tendency toward realism" as well as an eclectic background in architecture, interior design, and film in multiple countries and capacities, including set design for Marcel L'Herbier's visually groundbreaking L'Inhumaine (1924) and seven years as chief cook and bottle washer for the GPO Film Unit, e.g. Harry Watt and Basil Wright's Night Mail (1936). I have seen his name most often in connection with Ealing's horror anthology Dead of Night (1945), which I will undoubtedly watch sooner or later if only for Michael Redgrave. It would not be totally misleading to approach Went the Day Well? from a perspective of horror, but it is probably more fruitful to think of it in Cavalcanti's own terms. The Nazis had scrapped serious consideration of a full-scale invasion of the UK in the fall of 1940, but the specter lingered into the spring of 1942: it was an unlikely but not unrealistic thing for a British viewer to worry about. You would need a touch of the surrealist, however, to imagine that the German invasion would arrive in the guise of British Tommies, like being occupied by your own mirror universe. And however plausible or necessary it may be to posit that when ordinary, decent Britons finally galvanize themselves to grapple with their changeling invaders, they'll give as little quarter as they got, it's still a jolt when that determination involves a home-cooked meal, a pepper pot, and an axe.
According to the opening credits, Went the Day Well? was based on a 1940 short story by Graham Greene called "The Lieutenant Died Last," but as far as I can tell the screenplay by Ealing regulars John Dighton, Diana Morgan, and Angus MacPhail retains almost nothing of Greene's plot beyond the central idea of a small German force occupying a rural English village and a couple of professions and names. In a gesture as audaciously prophetic as the finale of Pimpernel Smith (1941), the entire film is framed in hindsight of an ultimate Allied victory, fondly recollected by the sexton (Mervyn Johns) who treats the camera as a friendly tourist; it is not that long since "old Hitler got what was coming to him" and the villagers are quite used to strangers arriving in their picturesque thirteenth-century churchyard to look at the white war memorial carved all over with German names: "They wanted England, these Jerries did—and this is the only bit they got." The date on the stone is May 25, 1942; the events which the sexton is about to relate were kept under strict government wraps until the war's end, when the newspapers retroactively christened that Whitsun weekend "the Battle of Bramley End." So we know from the start that bodies will hit the floor, but we don't know how thick and fast they'll do it. The early scenes are so pastoral, they're nearly parody. Here's the dear white-haired vicar (C.V. France) taking tea with his grown daughter (Valerie Taylor) who blushingly broadcasts her crush on "the leading light of our Home Guard" (Leslie Banks). Here's the publican's son (Frank Lawton) home from the Navy for his wedding to a spirited land girl (Elizabeth Allan) while the local poacher (Edward Rigby) drops them off a rabbit as a contraband gift. Here's the unflappable lady of the manor (Marie Lohr) and here's the gossipy postmistress (Muriel George) and here's the boldest of the London evacuees (Harry Fowler), Cockney chutzpah and all. There's sunshine and hedgerows and the clink of milk bottles and cuckoos lhudely singing until you can barely get a word in. Why shouldn't the narrative add a small convoy of Royal Engineers, dispatched to Bramley End for a vague "job of work" over the weekend? We already have the Home Guard, dutifully manning their observation posts and their machine guns and planning an exercise in the event of enemy paratroopers. Alas that the paratroopers have already landed and are the very men to whom the baker/OC (Ellis Irving) is proudly pointing out all his preparations. You begin to suspect uneasily that the invaders will not be the only Whitsun casualties buried around that stone.
These early sequences play most like conventional horror or suspense, with the audience all too urgently aware of the danger which the villagers are just fractionally too slow to detect in time; like black comedy, too, when one rough-tempered soldier is told roundly that he's "no better than a German" or the publican teases his newest customers that "We never had so many foreigners in the village before." The barricading of the lanes with barbed wire is briskly explained by the need "to put the village in a state of general defence," omitting the detail that the defending will need to be done against the British Army once the impostors begin their radio-jamming efforts in advance of the "airborne and seaborne invasion in force . . . to be launched Monday night." Discrepancies and peculiarities like a score sheet with all the numerals written in the Continental mode or a bar of Viennese chocolate stashed in a sapper's kit bag are either lost in the locals' effusive welcome or blocked outright by the mole in the village's midst, whose identity is no secret from the audience by the time the topic of fifth columnists is casually raised over dinner. There is no particular hurry to the reveal, either, which heightens the tension without any obvious stings or nudges. Sunday morning, the false soldiers make the rounds of the village to collect their fellows from their billets; they are seen off with jokes and sandwiches and even one parting kiss at the door, seemingly assimilated into the community overnight. We know this geniality can't go on indefinitely. By the end of Monday, unless there's some twist in store, all these laughing boys in bogus khaki are going to be dead, probably after trying to kill their equally cheery hosts. But we're well past the half-hour mark with no sign of hostilities, not even the accidental kind. How long can they keep it up? Don't they pose a real danger? Are we in some kind of gentle, plucky propaganda comedy after all?
Spoiler: we're not. Once the invaders reveal themselves, all bets are off in Bramley End. ( Well, I'm broadminded myself—and accidents will happen. )
I am not sure to what degree it's fair to consider Went the Day Well? as propaganda. I know it was made without official input from the Ministry of Information because Michael Balcon had burned bridges with them a few years previously; I also know that other Ealing films like The Big Blockade (1942) and The Next of Kin (1942) were produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the War Office, meaning he did not entirely spurn government commissions; and it is impossible for me to imagine that a film made smack in the middle of World War II in which the native grit and wit of rustic England successfully repel one Nazi invasion and prevent another would not have functioned as propaganda, whatever its formal genealogy. It becomes very slightly alternate history with its threatened amphibious invasion, but its events are otherwise scrupulously small-scale enough to have really happened. What then interests me about the movie is its message. Bramley End is not an especially allegorical village. Its inhabitants are not types beyond the usual small-town suspects. No individual action taken against the invaders succeeds with the force of the collaborative finale, but the deciding factor there is not so much a moral about team spirit as it is the practical absence of the character who could betray or divert their plans. And the film names the Nazis clearly as "forces of evil . . . the enemies and oppressors of mankind," but it offers little instruction for dealing with them beyond resist Nazis tooth and nail, even to your own death if necessary. Whatever you can do is worth doing. I admit there are worse takeaways from a 92-minute movie.
The title comes from an epitaph published in 1918 by John Maxwell Edmonds, who I am not surprised to read was a classical scholar who had previously translated Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" into Greek elegiacs, because the following is the sort of thing a person writes after exposure to Simonides' epitaph for the dead of Thermopylae:
Went the day well?
We died and never knew,
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
It may be, and I say this with affection and a little awe, the classiest thing about the movie. If films like The Moon Is Down and This Land Is Mine (1943) are prestige approaches to the themes of occupation and resistance, Went the Day Well? is the id-fueled pulp blackjack, a mess and an arguable masterpiece. I am reluctant to describe it as subversive only because it's so whack-a-ding-hoy that I'm not always sure what it's subverting, the answer in that case possibly being "What do you got?" I couldn't have dreamed it this weird and I'm so happy. It's full of heroic women and you can't be sure that the cute Cockney evacuee will survive the final reel any more than the courageous policeman or the incorrigible poacher. If you want to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis get theirs nastily, Cavalcanti and Ealing got there way ahead of Tarantino. This day brought to you by my proud backers at Patreon.
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