Went The Day Well?
IN MAY 1942, sometime between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Stalingrad, a troop of actors and crew members, under the command of a heavily accented Brazilian, gathered in the sleepy Buckinghamshire village of Turville to make a deceptively simple film with a distinctly odd title, drawn from a 1918 epigraph (“Went the day well? We died and never knew. But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you”) by John Maxwell Edmonds.
Expanded from Graham Greene’s 1940 short story The Lieutenant Dies Last and filmed as ‘They Came In Khaki’, Went The Day Well?
(US title: 48 Hours) begins with a fourthwall-breaking introduction by the vicar of ‘Bramley End’. Standing by a churchyard memorial to German soldiers — German soldiers? In Buckinghamshire? In 1942? — he begins to relate a story about a Nazi invasion of his pastoral village, clearly a metaphorical microcosm of England itself. The ensuing tale is told, in anecdotal retrospect, from the point of view of an Allied victory, a boldly optimistic position given the course of the war at that juncture, with the turning points — Midway, El Alamein and Stalingrad — still months away.
“It was Saturday morning when those army lorries came rumbling along the road,” he tells us, as we flash back to a shot of the trucks arriving, carrying dozens of enemy parachutists masquerading as British soldiers billeted to Bramley End. The Germans’ plan, aided by a local sleeper agent (played to the hilt by Leslie Banks, whose World War I injury left him with facial scars befitting a Bond villain), is to jam British radio signals to facilitate an “airborne and seaborne invasion” 48 hours later, making Went The Day Well?, as Penelope Houston noted in her BFI Film Classics text on the film, “the only British feature film made during the war to deal seriously… with the prospect of invasion.”
The villagers are initially, if grudgingly, accommodating. But isn’t it odd, the vicar’s daughter suggests, that one of the soldiers crosses his ‘sevens’ in the continental style while scoring a game of cards? And why does another display such casual brutality to a child evacuee? And while we’re ‘othering’ the newcomers, where did their commanding officer come by the bar of Viennese chocolate found in his kit bag? The audience is in on the conspiracy from the very beginning, and the film wastes no time in revealing it to the villagers: half an hour in, they are herded into the church, the village is barricaded, women are manhandled and threatened, and the then vicar is shot dead before his horrified congregation, after ringing out a warning on the church bells — a warning tragically misinterpreted by the home guard as a false alarm.
This shocking murder, at odds with the bucolic setting and its salt-of-the-earth inhabitants, is a mere taste of the savagery to
come, an unflinching depiction of violent acts that remain shocking to this day, such as when the local postmistress buries a hatchet in the head of an invader, before being bayonetted to death, or when the school’s headmistress runs from the room with a live hand grenade, saving the children in her class but blowing herself to smithereens. Dad’s Army it ain’t.
With its ruthless, cold-blooded Germans and brave, socially conscious Brits, pulling together to see off the Hun — complete with future national treasure Thora Hird wielding a machine gun — Went The Day Well? feels like a powerful propaganda film, yet it wasn’t an official one. By the time the film went into production, and even as civil servants were mulling over how to present the prospect of a German invasion to the British public, for fear that “if they were suddenly to find Germans in their back gardens, there might be a slight danger of panic”, Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union had already rendered the chances of an assault on England vanishingly small. In fact, producer Michael Balcon battled not only the Ministry Of Information, bafflingly indifferent to the persuasive power of film, but also his Ealing Studios bosses, who felt — not unreasonably — that the public wanted escapist comedies (which, after the war, would put Ealing on the map) rather than Bocheunder-your-bed thrillers.
Balcon can be credited with laying the foundations for the masterpiece that Went The Day Well? became, largely for his decision to hire the maverick Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti to direct it. A year earlier, the pair had collaborated on a short propaganda film about Italian leader Benito Mussolini (co-scripted, bizarrely, by future Labour Party leader Michael Foot), and Balcon was besotted with Cavalcanti’s artistry, intuiting that this leftfield choice of selfdescribed “surrealist with a tendency towards realism” would lend an outsider’s perspective to the script’s depiction of a typical English village and its archetypal denizens; surely no native would have had the objectivity — much less the audacity — to juxtapose “More tea, vicar?”-style dialogue with sudden outbursts of almost sadistic violence.
Far from being hailed as a masterpiece upon its UK release in December 1942, Went The Day Well? was largely dismissed by critics, trampled in the rush to laud contemporaries such as Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur and Shadow Of A Doubt. It has enjoyed a critical renaissance, albeit one that’s been glacially paced. It was the subject of a BFI Classics volume, published on the film’s 50th anniversary in 1992 (although even then, Penelope Houston, the author, described it as “not by any reasonable standard of measurement a major film”). And it’s had an impact on other filmmakers; its influence arguably stretches to Straw Dogs, Shaun Of The Dead and (especially) Inglourious Basterds, a movie which also took liberties with how things played out in World War II.
But it really wasn’t until the early part of this century that critics seemed to finally cotton on to its subversive, surrealist brilliance, a film which, as one critic put it, “establishes… the ultimate bucolic English scene, then takes an almost sadistic delight in tearing it to bloody shreds in an orgy of shockingly blunt, matter-of-fact violence.”
Of course, there was no German invasion of Britain during World War II. But as Went The Day Well? turns 80, “the Battle of Bramley End” stands as a boldly optimistic depiction of the indefatigable British spirit. As the vicar says at the film’s end, “We’re proud of ourselves here — proud we had the chance to do our bit.” This page, clockwise from left: Villagers Tom (Frank Lawton) and Jim Sturry (Norman Pierce); C.V. France as ill-fated vicar Reverend Ashton; Postmistress Mrs Collins (Muriel George) with shop clerk Daisy (Patricia Hayes).