IT HAPPENED HERE

Ruled Britannia

released OUT NOW! 1964 | PG | Blu-ray/dVd

Directors Kevin Brownlow, andrew Mollo

Cast Pauline Murray, sebastian shaw, Bart allison, reginald Marsh

From The Man In The High Castle to SS-GB, the idea of Nazi victory in World War 2 is one of the great preoccupations of the alt-history genre. It’s a scenario brought to the screen with a rare, unsettling authenticity in this remarkable piece of verité fantasy, begun – just as remarkably – when its directors were teenage boys.

It’s presented here in a new 2K remaster from the original camera negative, but the power and the urgency of the film comes from its sense of raw, newsreel reality, the stark documentary frisson of its grainy black-and-white images. German troop transports rattle past thatched cottages; riots explode on fascist-controlled London streets; reels of Nazi propaganda unspool with the reassuringly patrician tones of Pathe News. Interviews with real-life fascist sympathisers add to the shiver of verisimilitude. This was made as close to the war as we are from the millennium. Chillingly, it feels more relevant than ever.

Extras A new 65-minute interview with co-director Kevin Brownlow; 22 minutes of unseen behind-the-scenes footage with commentary by Brownlow; a seven-minute excerpt from a 1976 doc on Brownlow’s historical movie Winstanley; a short Italian TV item (four minutes); an interview with production assistant Johanna Roeber (12 minutes); an extended version of mock German newsreel “Mirror On The World”; a two-minute interview of the directors; trailers; booklet; a PDF of the foreword to Brownlow book How It Happened Here (DVD only). Nick Setchfield

Stanley Kubrick loved the movie, and donated film stock from Dr Strangelove to help Brownlow and Mollo finish it.

Its power comes from the sense of raw reality