It Happened Here

There was a paperback titled If The Nazis Had Come on bookstore shelves around the time It Happened Here was released. I didn't read it, but I did rent the VHS from Video Vault before it closed its doors forever. I found the film to be plausible because there was a great deal of sympathy for both Mussolini and Hitler particularly among the upper middle class. Think Miss Jeanne Brodie and Unity Mitford. Chamberlain was weak and despised, and many Britons would have welcomed Hitler with open arms. In this film German troops are seen milling about Trafalgar Square, but the film subtly reminds that they are Englishmen who joined the Wehrmacht -- just as you can find them in the French Foreign Legion. The Germans had left the British Isles to fight the Russians. Some viewers will be offended by the newsreel footage that explains the Jewish problem. And some viewers will find it hilarious. Despite its low budget, the producers did a good job with the backdrops and posters. Definitely worth watching.

A previous reviewer couldn't recommend the film too highly and said you owe it to yourself to see this. I can't go along with that. A lot of British people have tried to cheer themselves up with the thought that Hitlerism could never have taken root in Britain, because we're all so jolly decent and we'd never have put up with Onkel Adi. This film does a pretty good job of saying "Bull***t!" to that idea. Collaborating with the occupying power is a fairly obvious strategy for people who want a quiet life, or hope for advancement in the new society, because they don't believe that the occupation will be defeated. And if state-managed news media tell you only what they want you to hear, and portray things in an extremely odd light, then it's not surprising that people start to believe this stuff and spout it themselves. The basic narrative device is to follow the adventures of an Irish nurse who claims to have little experience of or interest in politics. She loses her friends to an attack by the resistance partisans, signs up, after some agonising, to nurse with the Nazi Action Brigade, and then has some experiences which ought to open her eyes to the immoral horror of Nazism. It's a pretty useful device: she gets to see both sides of things, so the audience does too. But we don't find out, really, what she thinks of these things: the film-makers obviously intend the audience to draw their own conclusions. The message of this film is uncompromisingly bleak. Men and women are capable of much worse than they think; fascism is a disease so virulent that one needs to adopt some of its own methods to have a chance of defeating it, and very few people are immune to its temptations (especially when agreement makes for a much less uncomfortable life). It's a very earnest film, but it isn't very interesting dramatically. Showing that ordinary people are susceptible requires that the events be fairly routine (in context), otherwise the audience can put the behaviour of which they would obviously disapprove down to the effects of special circumstances. That's honest, but drab, ordinary lives tend to make for drab, ordinary stories, and this is no exception. I'd recommend watching it, but don't expect it to be the highlight of your viewing week.

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.

I never knew this movie existed and I am still somewhat shocked after just watching this film at the incredible job that was done by a couple of independent film-makers. If someone had told me prior to seeing this movie that a couple of teenagers had produced an amazing movie based on the occupation of England by the Nazis in World War II, I would have said impossible. The movie lacks a little in quality because it was shot in 16mm and in some situations lacks the necessary lighting needed to bring off certain scenes, however, as the Summary above states, you can choose only ONE of the three criteria to work with. The producers did not have budget, or top quality equipment, or big name actors to work with, but they DID have time and they used it to create what can only be called a masterpiece. I have never lived in a country under occupation and I hope that I never will, however, I can understand the need for people to get on with their lives and even the necessity to actually collaborate with an enemy simply to survive. As it was put to our main actress in this movie, "You can nurse for us or you can stay home and nurse your empty stomach." She had no choice even though she wanted no political affiliation. This is the type of movie that makes you wonder and puts you in the position of saying, "What would I do in that case?" Watch this if you get the chance because it falls into the category that says, "Those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it."

yes this was a fine example of 'what if'. It certainly makes you think about how it might have been had Hitler succeeded. The book 'How It Happened Here' is due to be re-issued with a revised content and updates. The new book 'How It Happened Here' should be out in August but check availability on amazon or at the publishers website ukapress.com The DVD for this film is also available now with a great review on dvdtalk.com http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s100here.html In all, it's a film that hasn't had enough exposure. The concept is frightening and the idea should be bought back into the mind of a new generation. It is horrifying to think how close England came to being ruled by an unspeakable dictator.

What's most amazing about this film is that it was made by teenagers and looks good even for being shot in 16mm. Seeing Nazis goose-stepping in front of various UK landmarks and is pretty upsetting and totally convincing. The narrative loses a lot of steam after an hour (I think this film was expanded from a short) but the faked newsreel shown in a cinema halfway through the movie is totally flawless in its imitation of German propaganda films.

'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.

This film has one of the oddest production histories that I've ever heard about. Kevin Brownlow was appearantly only 18 years old when he came up with this idea and asked his then 16 year old friend Andrew Mollo if he could help out. It took them 8 years and with help from Stanley Kubrick,Tony Richardson, etc they managed to get film made. With that said it is astonishing film albeit flawed like so many other debut films but in this case the benefits outweighs the flaws. This is simple story about a nurse (in what has become nazi occupied UK)who must join the nazi party in order to feed herself. Even though her political views are different she has no choice, and joins but soon ends up in more trouble then before. The biggest problem with this film for me is the very bad audio, sometimes the young directors don't seem to know what kind of story they want to tell. Also some of the acting is flawed but becomes even more creepy when you know that some of the actors were real English neo Nazis. But this must be one of the best alternative history films I have ever seen so far. The film gives off a really good authentic feeling, something many films today lacks. And the ending serves as reminder of fascism, war crimes, evil that men do, regardless of political views.

I don't hand out 1's and 10's often, and while the production on this film is quite low, with the sound quality for dialogue being the absolute worst, this film is totally compelling and you will be grateful you gave it a chance. The movie is shot as a pseudo documentary, following the life of Pauline, a strangely attractive nurse who must relocate to London in a world where Nazi Germany has more than a foothold in England; Soldiers occupy the nation and many British citizens have become their collaborators. You should read the interesting history behind the making of this film which took something like 6 years to complete, if you can believe it. But wait until after you watch the movie, of course. I'm glad I didn't know much about it before I began watching. Fans of science fiction, dystopian fiction, and Orwell will eat this up and want more. This is a war film like few others in that you don't see much of the war itself, by that I mean the front lines. You see the daily life of citizens in a country where all their normal daily routines have been stamped out and they are recast in the roles of pseudo-Nazis whether they like it or not. What are you waiting for?

We owe a debt of gratitude to Brownlow & Mollo for the making of this film. I had never seen it until today, Dec25th 2011. It's a remarkable film especially when you consider it's meagre budget (said to have been $20,000), the ages of the film's makers, who were 18 & 16 and the eight years it took to produce. Everything about it seems strikingly authentic. The attention to detail is meticulous; the cinematography is inspirational; the subject matter is horrific and so very nearly came to pass; the poor sound quality and grainy black & white adds to the realism; the dark and brooding scenes are terribly atmospheric. I was born in 1949, close enough to the end of World War II to almost feel I was a part of it. I grew up listening to my parents' recollections and 'the war' has always felt very real to me. So it chills me to the bone to contemplate the England I may have been born into. 'It Happened Here' should act as a warning to today's deluded souls who think Fascism has any place at all in our political spectrum. Anyone who thinks it glorifies Fascism and is anti-Semitic has missed the point completely. First thing tomorrow I'm going to post it to my 16year old granddaughter studying Government & Politics. It should be made a compulsory part of the school curriculum. I can't thank Brownlow & Mollo enough for making this film and am just so sorry it took so long to discover it.