Invasão da Inglaterra

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.

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.

Being a Londoner, and born but a few months after England declared war on

Germany, this film has always held a special significance for me. I originally saw it when it opened in London: a mere twelve years after the worst war in living memory, had ended. I saw it for the second time recently at a friend's house. To me, it is still the best film about the occupation of a country by a foreign army. In his book, "How It Happened Here", co-director, Kevin Brownlow explains how he got the idea to

make this film. He just happened to be walking down a London street, at the

moment when a car screeched to a halt outside a shop. Four or so heavyset

men piled out of the car. They were dressed, recalls Brownlow, in grey

overcoats in a style reminiscent of Russian KGB agents. All were bulky and

acted in a furtive manner. It got Brownlow thinking: "what if....."

On a budget that can only be described as miniscule, it took Brownlow and his co-director, Andrew Mollo, eight years to complete the film. It's shot in a

quasi-documentary style, which makes it even more realistic. Their attention to detail is amazing considering the paucity of funds available - every uniform the actors wore was sewn by Mrs. Mollo. While I can't claim to personally 'remember' those years when London was

bombed constantly, I can recall the sound, or should I say lack of it (we were all inside a bomb shelter), when a German V-2 rocket (nicknamed a doodle-bug),

ran out of fuel and plummeted to the ground. We were lucky: it landed but a few streets away, killing many, many people, breaking windows, shaking chimneys and covering all our possesions in a thick layer of soot!

This film was shown recently as part of the Channel 4 War Weekend. I found it to be well made, and contained some very powerful images, of the German forces in occupation.

My only reservation is that I found it difficult to track the passage of time within the film.

The film deals with a woman, who is relocated to London, following Partisan activity at her home village. She becomes a Collaborator, not particularly from choice, but from circumstance. She is faced with a simple choice: work for the state, or don't eat. The film presents the Partisans as terrorists, whose methods differ little from the Nazis, although their objectives are purer. The film certainly made me think more about the life of the civilian in occupied territory. You could become a partisan, and act as a terrorist, or work for the forces of occupation, either directly, or indirectly. Or you could starve.

Well, what would you do?

"It Happened Here" is remarkable.

Somewhere along the line back around 1970 this was on TV in the UK and I watched it as a 12-year-old. I remember being stunned by it then. I have just watched it again after a gap of 52 years. It's still remarkable.

When this was made in 1964, the war was a "recent" memory. Plenty of people alive then had direct actual experience of war as adults. The "British" cultural memory was being formed in those years, and it reverberates today. I grew up in that environment.

I'm not sure that a film like "It Happened Here" could be made in Britain today. We have forgotten the actual experience of war and the impact it had here in reality. Very few people now have direct experience. Instead, we have stereotypes and myths. We have literally thousands of people engaged in "re-enactment" days or weekends. They dress up in facsimile German uniforms and flounce around as if it's clever. It's not clever.

The Nazi cult was vile and repressive. This was understood in a different way in 1964 to how it is understood today. Back then, Nazism was understood as insidious - it worked from the inside exercising it's power through propaganda, denounciations and control. "It Happened Here" shows us this world - the world we would have had.

The film itself is limited. Obviously made by amateurs on a limited budget in a different world. But it's ambitious in scope and daring. It was deliberately provocative - designed to challenge the world of 1964 and point out how dangerous right-wing thinking is.

Still a very remarkable piece.