Quarante-huit heures

In WWII England a troop of surveyors are dispatched into a characteristically happy-go-lucky and scenic village, though really they are a select assemblage of German officers with orders to seize control of the township on the horizon of a covert German attack in a few days. Director Alberto Cavalcani is smart. Rather than this information creeping up on us like a twist, we grasp this from the start. When one of the villagers grows suspicious, we are in an enhanced state of tension. The Germans hijack the parish, a handful among which refuse to lose hope of alerting the unsuspecting free world around them.

Do not make the mistake of presuming that it is an insincere propaganda yarn, considering its era. This is in fact quite an electrifying tale of survival. If so many can overlook the propaganda of obsolete films like Battleship Potemkin, there is certainly room for this picture. It stands out, owing much to its unexpected flashes of violence that are sincerely exhilarating and often frank and uncompromising in terms of the drama. It is not gritty like most modern war films. The quaintly timeless English ambiance, and the consistent theme of it maintaining its spry morale, is a clever and natural juxtaposition to the taut aggression of the conflict, which is thus more well-defined. The relatively unfamiliar cast is plainly high- quality.

At its hub, yes, it's a work of propaganda exploiting a thriller story to enrapture its WWII-era British spectators. But mind you, it is based on a story by English writer and WWII MI6 spy Graham Greene. Nevertheless, the English were righteous in that war, remaining the only European country the Germans intended to occupy but never could. This piece grows to be as riveting as any other good movie, and what's more, its unexpected violence causes it to project with particular prominence.

1942. That is the important date to bear in mind when watching this film. That was when the film was made, and when the UK cinema auidences watching it knew that all that separated them from invasion was a few miles of sea. Imagine the impact it must have had!! Plucky Brits, living in the rural English idyll, threatened by the Hun. Having witnessed their brave fight, the auidences must have come out of the flicks wanting to take on the German army on their own. The comparisons with 'The Eagle Has Landed' are easy to make, but just remember that date of 1942. The threat was real to the people watching it, unlike those watching 'The Eagle' for the very first time. Cracking afternoon entertainment, with a message of its time.

Watching Went The Day Well? put me in mind of American propaganda films about fifth columnists in the USA. Some like Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage were well made. The majority of them were so bad that even in those patriotic days of World War II, I'm betting a lot of the audience must have laughed uproariously even then, let alone seeing them now. I can recall the Nazis being involved in black market cattle rustling in a Three Mesquiteers film, the East Side Kids discovering a spy ring in one of their films, and in a Judy Canova film Joan Of Ozark she's targeted by Hitler himself for finding and destroying a wireless transmitter in Arkansas. These films are hysterically funny today even the concept of them.

But for the folks in the United Kingdom this was a real threat. Hitler and his legions were all along the coast of Europe ready to spring into action, threat of an invasion was real. The Germans occupied a few of the English Channel Islands which are part of the United Kingdom proper. To this day historians debate why he shifted his attentions from Great Britain to the Soviet Union. Because of that a film about German troops being brought in stealthily to the United Kingdom and assigned to take a certain village for its geographic location and relative inaccessibility, the better to defend if found out holds up even today.

That's what happens some elite German troops in the uniforms of British sappers are sent to occupy the village of Bramley End. Basil Sydney and David Farrar command the troops and they convince the townspeople at first they're real. A really stupid error on Sydney's part gives them away, so the village is occupied for real. An invasion is coming within a few days and the villagers make many attempts to get help from the outside.

The local squire is played by Leslie Banks and he's a Cliveden set type, a Nazi sympathizer. Banks has the best role in the film as he sabotages a few efforts at resistance.

I do love this film so, it shows that the people who united to save the British army to get them off the beaches at Dunkirk are still doing what they have to in order to save civilization itself. Leading the resistance is a sailor played by Frank Lawton who happens to be on leave visiting his family in Bramley's End.

Went The Day Well? is the best kind of wartime propaganda film and the people's resistance even in an event that never occurred will still inspire audiences today.

Now I am a sucker for "what if" stories, and what better to have Germans occupying an English village during the war.

What we have in this gem of a film is a great story, we see the villagers pull together and overcome the foe in heroic fashion. We are not spared the horrors of war, I think particularly of the scene when the telephone operator having summoned the courage to kill her German captor is killed trying to contact someone for help, you don't see anything but because of that it is all the more powerful. You are on the edge of your seat hoping the eggs with the message on will get through. We see a lady driving in her car, singing to herself, we then cut to the home guard being mown down on the road, their bodies cleared just as the woman drives round the corner. The two scenes together make for a powerful contrast. Bloody good stuff.

The pace continues through the film at such a rate that you do find yourself on the edge of the seat, the acting is great, though some may find the clipped English accent a little annoying, I liked the fact that there are a number of different accents from cockney to Yorkshire all making the "in it together" message more powerful. When the villagers start to fight back we get to see some hero's, none more so than the lady at the manor house who to save the children throws herself onto a grenade, I remember seeing this scene for the first time and being very moved by it, and every time I watch it again it has the same effect.

As a piece of propaganda it must have worked like a dream as a film it is well made and acted, what more could you want. Even more impressive is that it has aged very little.

Alberto Cavalcanti's outstanding piece of wartime propaganda is worthy of Hitchcock at his best. It's a surprisingly bleak and sometimes vicious study of British resilience, light years away from the dull Hollywood sentimentality of "Mrs Miniver". It's about a group of Fifth Columnists who take over a small British village in 1942 in preparation for the German invasion and of how the villagers fight back.

It has all the usual stereotypical villagers, (the post-mistress, the squire etc), but these clichéd parts are turned on their heads with surprisingly suspenseful results. Good performances, too, from everybody in a film that is largely undervalued, certainly in this country where we are inclined to acknowledge our 'heroism' but draw the line at going beyond that, as this film does, somewhat uncomfortably.