Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Theo Robertson Someone decides to make their own feature film ? Don't tell me , I know what's coming next - a zombie apocalypse filmed on someones mobile phone ? Well that's what happens in the 21st Century but away back in the mid 1950s two ambitious amateur film makers Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo pulled out all the stops to make an alternative neo-realist film featuring a scenario where Operation Sealion was a success and Britain is under the fascist jackboot and these two idealists managed to pull out all the stops . All I really know about the behind the scenes story is that it took them eight years and seven thousand pounds sterling of their own finance to produce it From a technical point of view IT HAPPENED HERE is somewhat crude . Filmed in black and white it resists the temptation to intercut real life footage of the second world war and instead everything on screen is pre-filmed for the camera . I'd be very interested in hearing amusing anecdotes about the production . Did the makers get strange reactions by asking where they could get some Waffen SS uniforms for example ? It is amazing that the production team gained access to so much military hardware and equipment . If there's a downside it's that the directors can't help showing off Nazi marching bands walking along the streets of London . Another negative is that the sound-mix is very poor It's the screenplay that makes up for any limitations in the mis-en-scene . One annoyance is that "England" is constantly mentioned throughout . I take it the Nazis stopped at the borders of Wales and Scotland or more likely the writers have euphemistically used the term England when they mean Britain/UK . As a Celt this upset me slightly then I quickly forgave them because the story quickly nails human nature under occupation . There's not really a central plot but this doesn't matter in the slightest because human nature is put under the spotlight and without pluralist democracy human nature knows no bounds when it comes to inhumanity By this I mean very few people would set you on fire , but by the same yardstick very few people would lift a finger to help you if you were on fire . Truth be told few people would p*ss on you if you were on fire . You ever worked for a corporate company ? I have worked for several and universally they operate in the same way a one party state does . Most people are indifferent to the company , they see it as a means to an end as in getting paid to feed their families and never lose their decency as humans or as colleagues . This isn't enough for some people . They are in a minority but give such people an inch of power and they shall take light years . Be thankful that democracy doesn't allow such people to rise to the top .If there's one problem with the film's politics it's equating the resistance not being all that different from the methods employed by the fascists and the film is book ended in that both sides have the justification of "If you're not for us you're against us". I can understand what the makers are trying to do but is it actually true that "The appalling thing about fascism is that you've got to use fascist methods to get rid of it." Presently in Syria the Kurdish YPG and their Arab comrades in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are engaged in a war against Daesh and the fascist Assad government who are backed by proxies from Russia , Iran and Turkey and yet never stoop to the methods of the regime they are fighting . That said in my own experience of politics there's a noticeable similarity between the far left and far right in that the world is constantly manipulated by a race of outsiders . Fascists use the word "Jewry" while leftists use the word "Zionists" and only the phraseology is different If nothing else IT HAPPENED HERE gives an interesting window on the world of what things would be like if the Nazis had won the Battle Of Britain . Perhaps the most scary thing is that it's a world not a million miles removed from our own corporate Western world where "We don't accept your decisions. You accept ours." . Don't be glad you live in a democracy . Be sad it's never going to be democratic enough

MARIO GAUCI This famous pseudo-documentary depicts what would potentially have occurred had the Nazi invasion of Britain during WWII been successful. It presents an interesting conjecture, to be sure, but one wonders what point was being made so long after the threat had been nipped in the bud, as it were…unless an analogous contemporaneous scenario (say, the Communist oppression rife in Eastern European countries) was being addressed!Anyway, the background to the movie under review is itself worth documenting: writer/director/cinematographer/editor Brownlow is best- known as a champion of film preservation (whose sterling work in the field was recently rewarded with an Honorary Oscar!); he was slated to introduce a September 2002 screening I attended of Erich von Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH (1928) at London's National Film Theatre but he eventually relegated it to an underling! Besides, Brownlow and his collaborator Mollo were still in their teens when they began work on IT HAPPENED HERE – which took some 7 years to complete! With this in mind, the semi-professional approach (some of it shot on 16mm stock, a cast almost exclusively made-up of unknowns and, reportedly, including Peter Watkins – himself an award-winning documentarist/movie director!) gives the whole an appropriate cine'-verite' feel.The episodic narrative follows the exploits of a female nurse who, witnessing the violence by a partisan group perpetrated on both the occupying German forces and collaborationist officials, misguidedly joins the local Nationalist Socialist movement which has arisen since the Reich's takeover. Visiting old friends, they are shocked to learn of her submission to Fascism – since they were themselves harbouring an injured resistance member and hoping she would help! However, when the couple is handed over to the authorities by a neighbouring cleric(!), she is transferred to a country-side hospital…only to discover that the elderly Jewish patients are being systematically exterminated by the staff! Ultimately, falling into the hands of the partisans herself, she willingly lends medical treatment to the wounded.

Rene000 'It Happened Here' is the only British war film which gives a true and accurate idea of what war is about: it is about civilians.All war films, with the exception of this one and a tiny handful of others, deal with boys in their uniforms shooting at each other in glorious Technicolour. The army obey codes of engagement and the goodies win. We identify with the heroes and frown at the villains, we feel sad when the second-stringer dies and exhilarated when the actor with the comic role survives, and so on.Civilians have no such luxury under occupation. This film deals with the dilemmas of surviving. with having to collaborate to a varying extent in order to earn a living, in fact with the real dilemmas which only those who lived through the Nazi occupation can truly understand. Collaboration is a slippery slope, well handled in the film as it is too in the French film 'Lacombe Lucien', where a feckless young man, rebuffed by the resistance, slips almost accidentally into collaboration for a bit of an adventure and some status.A recent article in the London press explained that the lengthy disquisition on the necessity of fascism in occupied Britain, as voiced by an English militiaman in the film, was in fact a pro-fascist argument put forward by a real leading British fascist, who made use of the film to expound his views. Within the context of the film, the views are seductively subversive and dangerously convincing. Think Goebbels when he presented the war against Russia as a European effort to eliminate the Bolshevist menace. This argument appealed to many 'right-thinking' people in occupied Europe as, barely a couple of years after the war, many right-thinking people thought that the communist menace should be eliminated.As a result of the filmed fascist diatribe, United Artists ordered Brownlow to remove this section (6 minutes, I think) and the film was originally screened without it.When the resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq is labelled terrorism, well, that is exactly what the German occupiers said about all resistance movements in Europe. Resistance movements included brigands, double-agents and ruthless operators as well as heroes. At the end of the war, these movements settled scores with collaborators and presumed collaborators, with unofficial executions running into the tens of thousands.Nothing wrong then, in having the British resistance in this film shown as behaving mercilessly. That is what real war is about and if we can't identify with it, then so much the better for those of us who never had to identify with an armed occupation either.

alan-morton The film sticks tenaciously in the memory, in a way that slick studio productions often fail to do.Visually, a fair bit of the film is a pastiche of German propaganda newsreels, or borrows from that library of pictures. This augments the feeling of realism and makes it an even bigger shock to see German troops marching through London, or relaxing off-duty, taking in the sights and admiring the women. No studio film would dare to take such an approach. And where did they find so much genuine-looking equipment? No studio film-researcher would ever be that scrupulous about accuracy.The sound-recording is dreadful and it would benefit from one of those clever clean-up jobs that are available these days. But what is said, and how it's said, are unforgettable. The wrong-headed justifications of Fascism that pepper this film sound like real people's words and they're spoken by what clearly are real people, who are taking a little time off from their real jobs to appear in the film. For instance, the fat, middle-aged, bureaucratic bully who voices many of the arguments has to have been in real life a school teacher or a bank manager: he looks and sounds the part in a way that studio actors working from a polished script could never manage.The ending is forced, but only because you feel that the film would be endless without a forced ending. Although a lot of things take place that are genuinely shocking (I won't list them as I'd have to announce spoilers), the point of the film isn't to relate a narrative that has a defined beginning, middle and end. The point is to make you feel that this is all real and make you wonder what your response would have been if the Nazis had started running your country.