![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
I refuse to see anything sinister in an elongated five
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. The Home Guard look dangerously silly when they first give their defenses away to a pack of disguised Nazis and then mistake the vicar's desperate signal-ringing for an overenthusiastic contribution to the parachute exercise, but silly authority figures are generally dumped in water or left tied up in closets, not coldly machine-gunned while bicycling down a leafy country lane. One survivor staggers to his feet, dragging one leg as he tries to escape; a German steps swiftly up behind him and puts a bullet in the back of his head. The impact knocks him a little forward off his feet. He's still falling, for all the world as if he just tripped on a sidewalk crack, as another of his wounded compatriots braces his elbows in the grass of the verge, aims his rifle, and is shot in the face. A couple of the rest are still feebly moving, but in a minute they won't be. The Germans drag the bodies off the road, commandeer the bicycles and walk on down the lane, indistinguishable to passers-by from the men they just murdered. There's little blood in the scene—and it's stage blood when we do see it—but it doesn't matter. The string-cut marionette drop of a dead man is as effective as blood-spray, the callousness with which the Germans sling and dump the bodies; it's fast, shocky violence, not especially dignified by the cinematography or the choreography, and its lack of sentiment makes it feel as real and unnerving as the shooting of the vicar at the bells, another death which didn't waste momentum being inspirational. There is not even care taken to conceal the gunfire because any military noise in the fields these days means "maneuvers." Daylight horror, bracketed with birdsong, it drives home the ease with which the invaders might get away with their masquerade. With the villagers penned up in the church and forbidden any attempts at escape or external communication past the routine minimum necessary to forestall the suspicions of the postman and the Sunday paperboy, the only representatives of Bramley End left at large are the Nazis, who don't look like any such thing. The driver who came by a moment after the massacre happily showed them her identity card.
The invaders, of course, are such perfect British imitations because they are all played by British actors—Basil Sydney, David Farrar, James Donald, John Slater—with the exception of the radio officer who doesn't speak any English and is played by Gerard Heinz. It's a similar effect to Michael Redgrave's English impersonation of a Czech impersonation of Englishness in The Captive Heart (1946), only here it plays on a sickening sense of nightmare instead of the hopeful potential of dreams. Surrealism thrives on juxtaposition and Went the Day Well? has a prime example in its premise, the bucolic heart of England as a Nazi battleground, but it gets additional uneasy mileage out of its handling of the Nazi characters. Sydney's Major Hammond may demonstrate a certain Teutonic crispness in private as Kommandant Ortler, but he and his men never unmask in the expected sense, never drop their well-drilled false accents or their treacherously trustworthy uniforms no matter the atrocities they commit. When Farrar's Leutnant Jung—formerly Lieutenant Maxwell—gives the order to execute five of the village children in reprisal for a failed escape attempt, it is even nastier because he doesn't sound like some Boche butcher of babies; he's been drinking at the manor house, he's irritated to be called out so late in the drenching rain, and he delivers his judgment in the brandy-blurred, arrogant drawl of the British officer class, looking darkly handsome and a little put-upon. On the one hand it's easy casting for Ealing and spares the audience a lot of bad German accents, on the other it's a creepy collapse of the borders of us and them. The enemy are not less Nazis just because they don't go around achtung-ing and heil-ing every other word. When open fighting breaks out between the invaders, the villagers, and the reinforcements of the real Home Guard and regulars of the Gloucestershire Regiment (playing themselves), only the addition of some leafy camouflage to one side allows the audience to distinguish between true and false soldiers of the King. An even greater ambiguity pervades Banks' Oliver Wilsford. He's the mole of Bramley End, as cleverly disguised by his urbane tweediness and record of local good works as his co-conspirators by their phony stories of growing up in Manchester and rowing at Cambridge ("He stroked the Jesus boat the year they bumped Emma"), but it is curiously unclear whether he's another German impostor or just a British quisling. The sexton's scene-setting line about "a real live German right under our very noses" implies the former, a sleeper agent taking his orders directly from Berlin; there is a later remark by Jung that he'll get the Iron Cross for his work in Bramley End. He may be so blandly, utterly English because he has to be, the counterfeit that's more convincing than the truth. The brief dismissive mention of "a potential fifth column in England," however, raises the possibility that Wilsford may be exactly as English as he appears, which would make him a traitor in the technical as well as emotional sense. In either case, he leaves the impression that knowing his nationality wouldn't explain him, his noncommittal air of command, his amused and strategic awareness of the feelings of Taylor's Nora Ashton, his ability to sabotage an escape by knifing one of his neighbors in the back, confer impatiently with Nazis at midnight, and then fall asleep on his own couch with a whisky and soda, only to snap seamlessly back into helpful, disarming mode as soon as he's awakened by an unexpected pair of Tommy gun-toting villagers in the morning. He volunteers no opinion as to the motives of fifth columnists, responds to the compliment about the Iron Cross with a distracted "Oh, yes, quite." He might be a more coherent screen villain if he had more of an interior life, but he's weirdly believable without one, as if you were to discover Iago had a seat on your city council.
I am not sure how much Cavalcanti cared about realism, but he may have achieved it even by accident. Nightmare is one of the ways the villagers understand their lives since Saturday morning, this terrible slippage from the pleasant anticipation of a Whitsun wedding into curfew and reprisals and desperate individual acts of resistance until the opportunity presents itself for a collective break, but the tone never shifts over totally from pastoral to thriller so much as it seesaws in a way that feels true to life, a broken mix of the normal and the completely fucked. Even heroic violence in this film is horrifying, which does not mean it is in the wrong—I am thinking of the justly celebrated scene which begins with George's Mrs. Collins taking a plate of sausage from her larder and finishes with her tear-streaked and shaking, trying to place a call past the cattily chatting operator even as a shadow moves in from the store. She is a sturdy, grandmotherly woman with greying hair that frizzes out at the front of its bun; she just hacked a man to death with an axe in her own kitchen. It is the first violent act we have seen on the part of a villager. It is one of the film's few surrenders to expressionism. It is extraordinarily effective. The camera seems to take snapshots, jangled as nerves: the axe handle lifted from its stack of kindling, a pepper-blinded man coughing to clear his eyes, the single, horror-stricken, unhesitating stroke up and down. A pistol lies among smashed crockery, just out of reach of a dead man's hand. The low, tense crescendo of strings cuts out and there is only Mrs. Collins' ragged breathing, her weeping, resolute voice repeating until the end, "Hello, Upton? Are you there?" There must be other comparably brutal scenes from the home front, but I am having difficulty bringing one to mind. Hitchcock must have kicked himself when he realized he didn't think of this one. There is one other death in Went the Day Well? that matches it for sheer shock value and it is very differently handled: that one happens literally in a flash, a door that just banged shut blown open. The audience may be stricken. Onscreen, in the general hail of guns, grenades, and shouting, it goes unremarked.
The climax of Went the Day Well? is similarly justly remembered, because it's the point at which the film will either lose its audience entirely or win them for life because what the ever-loving dumboozle. However startling the film's previous stagings of violence may have been, they cannot prepare the viewer for the three-way pitched battle that converges on the manor house like the forerunner of a zombie movie or the village-green-demolishing finale of Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007), with machine guns stuttering among the topiary and snipers picking one another off across the lily pond and bodies left lying everywhere from the greenhouse to the drawing room. Doors and windows are barricaded with antique clocks and grand pianos while artillery is stockpiled on the sofa. The publican's son and the sexton divide the Tommy guns between them and lay down fire on the lawn. A pair of land girls brace themselves with rifles in an upstairs hallway and take potshots into the orchard. One looks suddenly sick: "I shot one," she mumbles, unsure if she should be proud or throw up. "Good girl!" the other responds fiercely (Thora Hird in her third credited screen role). "You know, we ought to keep a score. That's one to you. Half a minute now, I'll have a go . . . Missed him," she mourns, reloading. "Can't even hit a sitting Jerry." From this angle, Went the Day Well? may be the oldest movie I've seen about the arrival of outsiders into a placid, rural community that turns on them remorselessly, albeit the outsiders are Nazis and no one is expected to sympathize with them; there is nothing here of the perverse empathy of 49th Parallel (1941) or even The Moon Is Down (1943). Its savagery can't really be classified as folk horror because the viewer is implicitly counted as one of the folk, but it still makes for a strikingly tough piece of art. There is no great reconciliatory scene when the fighting is over, no concluding triumph even; we are pulled directly from the turning tide of battle back into the churchyard where the sexton is just finishing up his pipe and his story: "We're proud of ourselves here, proud we had the chance to do our bit, but proudest of all for those who died, died in the battle for Bramley End." The camera retraces its opening shot through the half-timbered, tile-roofed houses (belonging to Turville in the Chiltern Hills, where I understand a lot of exteriors are filmed because the place is photogenic as hell) and out into the fields and hedgerows again as the end credits roll. Consequently our last views of most of the characters are effectively freeze-framed and often harsh. Nora is last seen in a room of shadows and strewn furniture, steadying herself after putting three bullets in a man: the first as cold as an execution, the superfluous second and third aghast and wild. Children in a cloud of smoke and plaster, staring at the doorway where the woman who saved them just died. The telephone girl who had hysterics but pulled herself together is pointing the real army to the manor house and they had better get the publican to a hospital when they're done mopping up the Nazis. It's not a downer ending, but it doesn't stick around to make friends. We've heard the story of the dead and we're done.
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. The Home Guard look dangerously silly when they first give their defenses away to a pack of disguised Nazis and then mistake the vicar's desperate signal-ringing for an overenthusiastic contribution to the parachute exercise, but silly authority figures are generally dumped in water or left tied up in closets, not coldly machine-gunned while bicycling down a leafy country lane. One survivor staggers to his feet, dragging one leg as he tries to escape; a German steps swiftly up behind him and puts a bullet in the back of his head. The impact knocks him a little forward off his feet. He's still falling, for all the world as if he just tripped on a sidewalk crack, as another of his wounded compatriots braces his elbows in the grass of the verge, aims his rifle, and is shot in the face. A couple of the rest are still feebly moving, but in a minute they won't be. The Germans drag the bodies off the road, commandeer the bicycles and walk on down the lane, indistinguishable to passers-by from the men they just murdered. There's little blood in the scene—and it's stage blood when we do see it—but it doesn't matter. The string-cut marionette drop of a dead man is as effective as blood-spray, the callousness with which the Germans sling and dump the bodies; it's fast, shocky violence, not especially dignified by the cinematography or the choreography, and its lack of sentiment makes it feel as real and unnerving as the shooting of the vicar at the bells, another death which didn't waste momentum being inspirational. There is not even care taken to conceal the gunfire because any military noise in the fields these days means "maneuvers." Daylight horror, bracketed with birdsong, it drives home the ease with which the invaders might get away with their masquerade. With the villagers penned up in the church and forbidden any attempts at escape or external communication past the routine minimum necessary to forestall the suspicions of the postman and the Sunday paperboy, the only representatives of Bramley End left at large are the Nazis, who don't look like any such thing. The driver who came by a moment after the massacre happily showed them her identity card.
The invaders, of course, are such perfect British imitations because they are all played by British actors—Basil Sydney, David Farrar, James Donald, John Slater—with the exception of the radio officer who doesn't speak any English and is played by Gerard Heinz. It's a similar effect to Michael Redgrave's English impersonation of a Czech impersonation of Englishness in The Captive Heart (1946), only here it plays on a sickening sense of nightmare instead of the hopeful potential of dreams. Surrealism thrives on juxtaposition and Went the Day Well? has a prime example in its premise, the bucolic heart of England as a Nazi battleground, but it gets additional uneasy mileage out of its handling of the Nazi characters. Sydney's Major Hammond may demonstrate a certain Teutonic crispness in private as Kommandant Ortler, but he and his men never unmask in the expected sense, never drop their well-drilled false accents or their treacherously trustworthy uniforms no matter the atrocities they commit. When Farrar's Leutnant Jung—formerly Lieutenant Maxwell—gives the order to execute five of the village children in reprisal for a failed escape attempt, it is even nastier because he doesn't sound like some Boche butcher of babies; he's been drinking at the manor house, he's irritated to be called out so late in the drenching rain, and he delivers his judgment in the brandy-blurred, arrogant drawl of the British officer class, looking darkly handsome and a little put-upon. On the one hand it's easy casting for Ealing and spares the audience a lot of bad German accents, on the other it's a creepy collapse of the borders of us and them. The enemy are not less Nazis just because they don't go around achtung-ing and heil-ing every other word. When open fighting breaks out between the invaders, the villagers, and the reinforcements of the real Home Guard and regulars of the Gloucestershire Regiment (playing themselves), only the addition of some leafy camouflage to one side allows the audience to distinguish between true and false soldiers of the King. An even greater ambiguity pervades Banks' Oliver Wilsford. He's the mole of Bramley End, as cleverly disguised by his urbane tweediness and record of local good works as his co-conspirators by their phony stories of growing up in Manchester and rowing at Cambridge ("He stroked the Jesus boat the year they bumped Emma"), but it is curiously unclear whether he's another German impostor or just a British quisling. The sexton's scene-setting line about "a real live German right under our very noses" implies the former, a sleeper agent taking his orders directly from Berlin; there is a later remark by Jung that he'll get the Iron Cross for his work in Bramley End. He may be so blandly, utterly English because he has to be, the counterfeit that's more convincing than the truth. The brief dismissive mention of "a potential fifth column in England," however, raises the possibility that Wilsford may be exactly as English as he appears, which would make him a traitor in the technical as well as emotional sense. In either case, he leaves the impression that knowing his nationality wouldn't explain him, his noncommittal air of command, his amused and strategic awareness of the feelings of Taylor's Nora Ashton, his ability to sabotage an escape by knifing one of his neighbors in the back, confer impatiently with Nazis at midnight, and then fall asleep on his own couch with a whisky and soda, only to snap seamlessly back into helpful, disarming mode as soon as he's awakened by an unexpected pair of Tommy gun-toting villagers in the morning. He volunteers no opinion as to the motives of fifth columnists, responds to the compliment about the Iron Cross with a distracted "Oh, yes, quite." He might be a more coherent screen villain if he had more of an interior life, but he's weirdly believable without one, as if you were to discover Iago had a seat on your city council.
I am not sure how much Cavalcanti cared about realism, but he may have achieved it even by accident. Nightmare is one of the ways the villagers understand their lives since Saturday morning, this terrible slippage from the pleasant anticipation of a Whitsun wedding into curfew and reprisals and desperate individual acts of resistance until the opportunity presents itself for a collective break, but the tone never shifts over totally from pastoral to thriller so much as it seesaws in a way that feels true to life, a broken mix of the normal and the completely fucked. Even heroic violence in this film is horrifying, which does not mean it is in the wrong—I am thinking of the justly celebrated scene which begins with George's Mrs. Collins taking a plate of sausage from her larder and finishes with her tear-streaked and shaking, trying to place a call past the cattily chatting operator even as a shadow moves in from the store. She is a sturdy, grandmotherly woman with greying hair that frizzes out at the front of its bun; she just hacked a man to death with an axe in her own kitchen. It is the first violent act we have seen on the part of a villager. It is one of the film's few surrenders to expressionism. It is extraordinarily effective. The camera seems to take snapshots, jangled as nerves: the axe handle lifted from its stack of kindling, a pepper-blinded man coughing to clear his eyes, the single, horror-stricken, unhesitating stroke up and down. A pistol lies among smashed crockery, just out of reach of a dead man's hand. The low, tense crescendo of strings cuts out and there is only Mrs. Collins' ragged breathing, her weeping, resolute voice repeating until the end, "Hello, Upton? Are you there?" There must be other comparably brutal scenes from the home front, but I am having difficulty bringing one to mind. Hitchcock must have kicked himself when he realized he didn't think of this one. There is one other death in Went the Day Well? that matches it for sheer shock value and it is very differently handled: that one happens literally in a flash, a door that just banged shut blown open. The audience may be stricken. Onscreen, in the general hail of guns, grenades, and shouting, it goes unremarked.
The climax of Went the Day Well? is similarly justly remembered, because it's the point at which the film will either lose its audience entirely or win them for life because what the ever-loving dumboozle. However startling the film's previous stagings of violence may have been, they cannot prepare the viewer for the three-way pitched battle that converges on the manor house like the forerunner of a zombie movie or the village-green-demolishing finale of Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz (2007), with machine guns stuttering among the topiary and snipers picking one another off across the lily pond and bodies left lying everywhere from the greenhouse to the drawing room. Doors and windows are barricaded with antique clocks and grand pianos while artillery is stockpiled on the sofa. The publican's son and the sexton divide the Tommy guns between them and lay down fire on the lawn. A pair of land girls brace themselves with rifles in an upstairs hallway and take potshots into the orchard. One looks suddenly sick: "I shot one," she mumbles, unsure if she should be proud or throw up. "Good girl!" the other responds fiercely (Thora Hird in her third credited screen role). "You know, we ought to keep a score. That's one to you. Half a minute now, I'll have a go . . . Missed him," she mourns, reloading. "Can't even hit a sitting Jerry." From this angle, Went the Day Well? may be the oldest movie I've seen about the arrival of outsiders into a placid, rural community that turns on them remorselessly, albeit the outsiders are Nazis and no one is expected to sympathize with them; there is nothing here of the perverse empathy of 49th Parallel (1941) or even The Moon Is Down (1943). Its savagery can't really be classified as folk horror because the viewer is implicitly counted as one of the folk, but it still makes for a strikingly tough piece of art. There is no great reconciliatory scene when the fighting is over, no concluding triumph even; we are pulled directly from the turning tide of battle back into the churchyard where the sexton is just finishing up his pipe and his story: "We're proud of ourselves here, proud we had the chance to do our bit, but proudest of all for those who died, died in the battle for Bramley End." The camera retraces its opening shot through the half-timbered, tile-roofed houses (belonging to Turville in the Chiltern Hills, where I understand a lot of exteriors are filmed because the place is photogenic as hell) and out into the fields and hedgerows again as the end credits roll. Consequently our last views of most of the characters are effectively freeze-framed and often harsh. Nora is last seen in a room of shadows and strewn furniture, steadying herself after putting three bullets in a man: the first as cold as an execution, the superfluous second and third aghast and wild. Children in a cloud of smoke and plaster, staring at the doorway where the woman who saved them just died. The telephone girl who had hysterics but pulled herself together is pointing the real army to the manor house and they had better get the publican to a hospital when they're done mopping up the Nazis. It's not a downer ending, but it doesn't stick around to make friends. We've heard the story of the dead and we're done.
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.
no subject
I understand it was a real fear and not just a flight of fantasy. (It exists in American films of the time, too, although there it shades over into the kind of ethnic paranoia that brought you the Japanese-American internment.) I just think Went the Day Well? carries it to the point of uncanny valley, and that interests me in part because it's not found in the original short story at all.
ETA: You have to presume "Went the Day Well" is a very conscious source for Deighton's "The Eagle Has Landed".
I have not read that! Recommended?
Relatedly, have you seen The One That Got Away (1957)?
no subject
no subject
Apparently I'm wrong, it's not Len Deighton, it's Jack Higgins. I've not read it, however I have seen the film, repeatedly - John Sturges directs, Michael Caine is the lead as Steiner, the discredited German paratroop officer dropped into the UK with a handful of men disguised as Polish paras in order to kill Churchill. Donald Sutherland is Liam Devlin, their IRA contact (a Higgins regular, and later mentor to his main series character, the assassin Sean Dillon), Jenny Agutter is the love interest, and a whole host of British stalwarts turn up to play the locals, plus Larry Hagman and Treat Williams as the American Rangers arriving to save the day (or not). Donald Pleasance delivers a disturbing turn as Himmler. Definitely worth watching. A major difference from 'Went the Day Well' is that the focus is on the Germans, rather than the Brits.
I have seen 'The One Who Got Away', to the point that I instantly said 'Hardy Kruger'. On a similar theme, I'd recommend 'The McKenzie Break'. With some basis in fact, it's Bryan Keith sent in to investigate what's happening in a remote PoW camp, where the German submariners are Up To Something.
no subject
I mean, that's certainly a cast I'll pay attention to.
I have seen 'The One Who Got Away', to the point that I instantly said 'Hardy Kruger'.
Oh, good. The Flight of the Phoenix really did imprint me on him for life.
On a similar theme, I'd recommend 'The McKenzie Break'. With some basis in fact, it's Bryan Keith sent in to investigate what's happening in a remote PoW camp, where the German submariners are Up To Something.
I'd heard of the historical basis, but not of the movie. Thanks!
no subject
And I didn't even mention Robert Duvall as Steiner's boss, or Antony Quayle as Admiral Canaris. Small parts, but Duvall's so good.
Which is prompting memories there was something similar, though more serious, in Australia with Japanese prisoners - the Cowra breakout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowra_breakout While that has a bunch of books and a mini-series, it doesn't seem to have had any attention from the mainstream cinema.