Customer Reviews

It Happened Here: The Story of Hitler's England [VHS]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The premise of this most unusual war film is that Britain was invaded and occupied after the Dunkirk retreat, and in a mixture of documentary and narrative styles it sets out to tell the story of the occupation that the country narrowly (some would say, unaccountably) escaped, up to and including the 'liberation', orchestrated by the efforts of local partisans with American assistance, in the war's closing year.

It is hard to believe that this film began its life as the spare-time project of 18-year-old Kevin Brownlow, a film enthusiast working in the cutting-room of a small London production company, and his 16-year-old schoolboy friend Andrew Mollo, who had a passion for military history and a collection of old German uniforms and regalia. Starting without a budget, using a borrowed 16 mm camera, the two doggedly pursued their dream of completing the project for almost eight years, finding actors, actresses, sets and backing as they went along.

This is a low-key, reflective war drama, which follows its central character, an Irish- born district nurse working in a village near Salisbury, through the horrors of a partisan ambush that goes wrong, to a chilling Nazi-dominated vision of London, where she finds herself assimilated into the highly political "Immediate Action Organization" and receives her "political re-education", on to a rural medical centre specializing in euthanasia for "undesirables", through to the final chilling irony of "liberation" and the wholesale slaughter of "collaborators".

The most famous sequence in the work is a six-minute scene in which genuine Neo- Nazis expound their ideas. The Directors were required to cut this sequence at the behest of its first distributor, United Artists, but it has now been reinstated.

I found this film disturbing, unsettling, unforgettable. The scale of the achievement involved in the creation of a work of this quality from such humble beginnings can hardly be overstated.

I'll start off by just mentioning a few minor niggles. Firstly, the film is presented in a TV 4:3 aspect ratio. I don't know what print was available to the DVD's producers, but the original aspect ratio (1.85:1 at a guess) would have been more desirable. The movie's ending is also quite abrupt - I had to look twice when the film's end title appeared. And finally, the 1974 follow-up documentary 'It Happened Here Again' which appears on some VHS versions, is sadly missing from this DVD. Now that's out of the way, please ignore what I've just written as the DVD's good points far outweigh the bad. The film was produced at a time when 'warts and all' realism was the driving force behind many films and TV productions. Thus we see British citizens act as willing collaborators to the Nazi invaders, even up to the point of murdering Jews and the massacre of surrendering German soldiers. This is a constantly thought provoking and conscience testing picture produced by two very talented young film makers. On the technical side, picture quality is superb - slightly grainy but far better than you would expect given the independent nature of the production. The DVD does not contain any special features. I imagine that the DVD's producers thought that the limited appeal of this film did not merit the additional costs involved. Still, this is definitely worth a look for anyone interested in gritty British movies from the 1960's.

I had read about It Happened Here for years before I had a chance to see it and assumed it was created by and for teenaged nerds who make detailed models of Tiger tanks and Stukas. However, what impressed me the most about this film was its adult, complex plot. I would not have expected two young film and military history geeks to choose as their main character a woman faced with making moral compromises to survive in a Nazi- occupied England. The fanatical devotion to period accuracy that Brownlow and Mollo display only serves to enhance the film's depiction of the brutality of life under the Nazis.

Considering the problems with getting their independently produced film onto the screen, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo have succeeded brilliantly. The film follows the story of an average citizen living under Nazi German occupation, in this case what England would have been had the Germans invaded in 1940. With Mollo's historical expertise this is carried out convincingly,especially with the inclusion of foreigners collaborating with the Germans (yes, that did occur in occupied Europe). Technically Mollo succeeds where other less precise film-makers (some with unlimited budgets) fail miserably; the vehicles, weapons, uniforms are what you would see in 1944-1945 Europe. Despite the amateur nature of some of the actors with spoken (and unspoken) lines, the film nevertheless is enjoyable. The "documentary" like cinamatography adds to the illusion. Brownlow and Mollo put together a credible story line, one that enlightens and entertains. If you are interested in seeing, or learning about, life under German occupation during the Second World War, especially that of Western Europe, you will enjoy viewing this classic.

I saw this film at the National Film Theatre in London, UK, in 1997. Some people were so offended that they left the cinema. It starst with the words: "The conquest of England was swift and brutal. Due to pressure from the eastern from German troops are removed from England, and the garrisoning of England is largely carried out by British volounteers..." From there on the film gets more provocative.
Low budget, only one professional actor, but the message is hammered home relentlessly: We cannot blame the Germans only for the crimes of the Nazis. Given half a chance we will happily commit them oursleves.

On a shoestring budget in 1956, directors Kevin Brownlow-now a preeminent film historian-and Andrew Mollo began work as teenagers on their Orwellian "It Happened Here"; with the help of hundreds of volunteers, they completed the film in 1964. In 1966 United Artists released the film with seven minutes of controversial material excised. In this version, Brownlow, having regained the rights to the film, restores the cut sequence-an ad-lib speech by Colin Jordan, head of the British National Socialist movement.

Brownlow and Mollo offer an alternate history of England, a vision of England under Nazi occupation after Germany has won World War II. Their use of grainy black-and-white photography and faux newsreel footage enhances the documentary-like realism.

The story follows an apolitical nurse, Pauline. Accepting a job with the Nazis in London, she comes to apprehend the ramifications of the occupation-radio stations, movies and magazines serving as propaganda organs for the Nazis and goose-stepping schoolchildren. Pauline finds herself caught between the galvanized resistance on one side and on the other, citizens who, for the sake of a quiet life, prefer to acquiesce.

If you liked Len Deighton's detective thriller, "SS GB", set in Nazi-conquered England, you might enjoy "It Happened Here." To my way of thinking, this black-and-white film has the feel of a documentary. Its story of one person's realization of the creeping social evil in which she now lives is at once riveting and chilling.

In 1945, George Orwell wrote defiantly: "Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and quislings. It best it is largely a punishment of the guilty by the guilty."

In the same humanistic yet brutally honest vein comes IT HAPPENED HERE, a 1965 "documentary-style" movie which speculates with terrifying frankness what a Nazi occupation of Britain might have been like. No film I've ever seen have addressed the subject of "collaboration" with such unflinching honesty, and I suggest this film is a must-see for those who still glorify the "resistance fighters" of Europe and view with contempt and hatred the everyday people who "volunteered" their services to their conquerers during the Second World War.

IT HAPPENED HERE speculates that the Germans invaded Britain in 1940, conquered the Islands, and set up a puppet government. Sapped by the ravenous demands of the Eastern Front, the Germans leave only a small garrison in Britain and depend largely on British "collaborators" to police the country, run the government, operate the social services, and so on. The film is told from the POV of Pauline, a widowed country nurse who is simply trying to get by in a country where half the buildings are in ruins, partisan warfare rages in the country, and just getting a decent job requires moral compromise.

IT HAPPENED HERE does not have a plot, per se; true to its documentary style it merely follows Pauline as she travels England, looking for work and trying with pathetic dignity to avoid taking a "side" either for the puppet government or the ruthless and ham-fisted partisan movement that opposes it. Every frame of the film hammers home the impossibility of living under occupation: Forced to join a collaborationist organization just to work, Pauline is ostracized by her friends (one of the movie's best scenes is an argument between Pauline and her doctor friend about the morality of fascism, collaboration and resistance), and yet her own sense of personal decency makes her a pariah among her new comrades. This ultimately leads to her being banished to the country, where what seems like an idyllic nursing-home job turns out to be a macabre nightmare. After spending most of the movie on the moral fence, Pauline must now make a consciously political act, but even this gives her no peace. And
in the end, however, the impending "liberation" (accompanied by frenzied radio broadcasts no less chilling than their Nazi counterparts) promises a classic British recipe: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

IT HAPPENED HERE is brutally frank in its examination of what happens to ordinary people in impossible circumstances, and how war and occupation are machines for debasing human nature. The people we meet are a mix of fanatics, time-servers, patriots, cynics, and fair-weather sailors -- in other words, everyday folks who discover in extremis what kind of people they really are, and what they will (or won't) do for a soft bed, hot food and chance to live another day. The film's climactic scene, which features a vicious massacre of British SS volunteers (in the "Black Prince" volunteer SS division -- nice touch!) at the hands of the partisans while their German SS officers are allowed to honorably surrender, well demonstrates the doctor's schizoid (but possibly correct) view that "the horrible thing about fascism is you have to use fascist methods to destroy it."

I should say that IT HAPPENED HERE is frought with the problems which plague low-budget films. There is liberal, if skillful, use of stock footage; the acting is extremely inconsistent, the sound quality (especially at the beginning) is bloody hideous, and there is a clumsy amateurishness to some of the production. Getting through the first half-hour of the film isn't easy. But if you do, you will discover a b*llsy and brilliant little gem of a movie, one which has the moral courage to ask the most difficult possible question: "OK, but under those circumstances, what would YOU do?"

If this was done on a shoe- string budget 39 years ago, one can only wonder what an updated version, in color, could be done nowadays. This 95 minute grainy black and white is sometimes just slightly hard to follow, probably only for a State Sider dealing with the "Brit" accents. Partly in documentary style, partly following a fairly naive, but good hearted nurse who finds the only way to assist her countrymen is to join the SS sponsored nursing service. Needless to say, some of her innocence is shattered. Some realistic fascist oriented discussions, funerals, reenactments of the Great War Christmas truce between the Brit and German soldiers, and some very daring battle and partisan scenes make this among the best War films ever. Shame it's not better known!

IT HAPPENED HERE is one of the most chilling and controversial films never to hit the public consciousness. It is the brainchild of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo who spent eight years on the tightest of budgets to shoot an alternate history of the second world war. The Germans invaded England in 1940 and occupied it shortly. The viewer sees the action under a grainy style of camera work that might have been dictated by financial necessity but disturbingly original for that. Much of the film is a series of vignettes that portray life in England under Nazi rule. We see women and children machine gunned by grinning SS guards. We see the dirty grind of life under the jackboot. As I got involved in the story, I soon realized that these vignettes were to form a subtext that would become clear as the plot began to revolve slowly around an unemployed nurse (Pauline Murray) who needed to overcome her apolitical stance to join a nursing organization that was run by British traitors wearing SS style black uniforms. At first she tells herself that Britain has somehow to regroup itself and her being able to practice her profession must be a part of that. She even tells herself that it is morally acceptable to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the very atrocities that the viewer encounters. And it is precisely here that Brownlow and Mollo make their telling point that to acquiece to evil is to join that evil. Pauline now wears the black uniform of her nursing regiment. Still, she cannot so easily shed her morality. What we find astonishing and ultimately depressing are the numbers of fellow Brits who have no such difficulty. The numbers of German speaking soldiers are in the minority. Far more ubiquitous are the native English who can mouth phrases and philosophy that might have flowed from the vilest of anti-semitic propaganda films. Brownlow and Mello allow these English ample screen time to spout their obscenities all the while slowly pointing toward the moral regeneration of nurse Pauline. There is another subtext that is equally disturbing. While Pauline is discussing how close she came to being shot by British rebels fighting the Nazis, the man to whom she is speaking startles her by replying that to fight fascists one must fight like them. This second subtext reappears during the closing scenes which suggest that the easier it is for one to do that, the closer one is to the fascist himself and hence the less human one truly is. It is impossible to view IT HAPPENED HERE without the sobering realization that the events of this movie happened more than a few times in more than a few countries. This then is the inner lesson of what happens to the easily malleable who find that the act of putting on a uniform changes more than one's appearance.