Went the Day Well?

As we watch the daily reports out of Ukraine and reacquaint ourselves with the obscenity of war – brought down on a city of Europe – I’m convinced that Putin was right and we have no more stomach for it. We have watched the war in Syria for a decade without comparable discomfort and mutter “fucking savages” under our breath, believing that such things as dropping poison gas in barrel bombs on civilians was no longer conceivable in our part of the world. Now we are told that Russia is calling in a debt from Assad and that Syrian forces are being deployed in Ukraine. Putin wants us to see the brutality and complete inhumanity because he has a hunch we will shrink from defending NATO allies like the Baltic states when he decides to attack them. It’s ironic that Americans are seen as the most violent, bloodthirsty people in the world when others (like Putin) are convinced that we will no longer stand up and fight for our values. 

How comforting to turn to a British film made during the war against the Nazis that shows us the unquestioning determination of a people that their values - our values - will prevail against the enemy's. The film is Alberto Cavalcanti's quite unique and somewhat strange Went the Day Well? (1) Under the film’s opening credits we are transported to a town known as Bramley End (it was filmed in Turley, in Buckinghamshire, and if you look for it on Google Earth it doesn’t appear to have changed at all). Once there, a pipe-smoking local (Charles Sims, played by Mervyn Johns) approaches and addresses the camera: 

Good day to you. Come to have a look at Bramley End, have you? Pretty little place, and a nice old church, too. 13th century, parts of it. Still, it won't be that that's brought you, I don't suppose. It'll be these names on this grave here and the story that's buried along with them. Look funny, don't they? German names in an English churchyard. They wanted England, these Jerries did, and this is the only bit they got. The Battle of Bramley End, that's what the papers called it. Nothing was said about it 'till after the war was over and old Hitler got what was coming to him. Whitsun weekend it was, 1942. 

The rest of the film, then, is a flashback from after the war is won. It’s a quite interesting film, rather like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. From the moment of the Germans’ victory in France in June 1940, an invasion of England was expected to happen next. That year, Graham Greene wrote a story called, “The Lieutenant Died Last,” that was a somewhat comical, terse account of an attempt by German paratroopers to commandeer the small English village of Potter. Their attempt is foiled by the village’s old poacher Bill Purves, who witnesses the descent of the German parachutists – dressed in German uniforms. Their commander enters the Black Boar public house and tells the proprietress, “I am a German officer and this village is occupied by my men.” 

Greene’s story was expanded and, I think, improved by the film's three credited script writers, John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, and Diana Morgan. In their script, the Germans are disguised as British soldiers involved in a military exercise. Their commander, Kommandant Ortler aka Major Hammond, played by Basil Sydney, who was King Claudius in Olivier’s film of Hamlet, is a typically officious, utterly intolerant tyrant who commits the first of the film’s atrocities by shooting the village vicar, Father Owen (played by Arthur Ridley), to death when he rings the church bell. 

The German arrival in the village is anticipated by the local squire, Oliver Wilsford, played with perfect poise by Leslie Banks, who is evidently a fifth columnist and Nazi spy. The villagers aren’t fooled for very long by the Germans’ quite feeble attempts to convince them that they’re British – the giveaway is a bar of Austrian chocolate (spelled “chokolade” with the word “Wien” on the chocolate bar itself) that a boy finds in the pocket of one of the soldiers. “P’raps he snitched it from a Jerry what crashed?” the boy suggests. 

Once their cover is blown, the gloves are off and the Germans have to resort to “Plan B” which requires all villagers to assemble in the church where they are kept under guard. How the villagers manage to foil the Germans’ plans and pin them down until the real British soldiers arrive is gripping to watch, even 80 years later. 

There is some real savagery in some scenes – savagery that isn’t at all disguised or prettified by the filmmakers. Aside from the almost surreal depiction of men in British uniforms shooting at one another along village roads and hedgerows, especially noteworthy is the extraordinary toughness of the women in the film. We watch a cheery Mrs Collins (Muriel George) throw pepper in the face of one of the Germans and kill him with one stroke of a hatchet. She is then bayonetted by another soldier. The dastardly squire is shot to death by the vicar’s daughter (Valerie Taylor) who evidently loved him, and dowdy Mrs Fraser (the great Marie Lohr) saves a room full of children by grabbing a live grenade thrown through a window by a German and jumps out of the door. It is followed by a blast in which Mrs Fraser is killed, but the children are safe. 

You could argue that a bit much – too much – is made of the deep down decency of the villagers. It is a sort of faith or trust by all English people that their neighbors are in the same boat they are in. It’s a quality that English films always seem to exude – a quality that James Agee noted with admiration. (It was a quality that Agee didn’t find in American films.) You can find it in British wartime films especially, like David Lean’s In Which We Serve and the Powell/Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale. It is worth noting that the British fought the Germans alone for 18 months after the fall of France until the US entered the war in 1941. 

Went the Day Well? is easily one of the most curious products of wartime British film production, a propaganda film that, once exhibited during wartime, was then shelved for decades. The British Film Institute restored it in 2010 and it was released to theaters to general astonishment.

(1) The title is a line from an epitaph by John Maxwell Edmonds:

Went the day well? 

We died and never knew

But, well or ill,

Freedom, we died for you.