The quiet village of Bramley End is taken over by German troops posing as Royal Engineers. Their task is to disrupt England's radar network in preparation for a full scale German invasion. Once the villagers discover the true identity of the troops, they do whatever they can to thwart the Nazis plans.
Went The Day Well, Went the Day Well? (48 Hours), 48 Horas!, Went the day well?, E' andata bene la giornata?, 48 아워스, 四十八小时
UK
UK
Geez! The stakes in this game are as high as electric wires!
I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into in this rural British setting but dang do things get turned to eleven in a way that I didn’t think that 1942 could.
First of all we get a naturalized setting with a narrator with a pipe telling us a story about how things unfolded but as we get clipped into this story we get shook by the myriad of elements that unfold that I have to say personally was shocked by and smartly smash the beginning narrative and really had me questioning where this story will land.
This was a great find and would totally recommend checking it out if you want a different slice of WW2 propaganda that never feels ham fisted.
Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy unconventional war stories or just intense combat moments.
You don't mess with a gun toting Thora Hird!
A superb wartime propaganda piece from Ealing and a classic war film, 1942's Went The Day Well? has its origins in a Graham Greene short story entitled The Lieutenant Died Last. Published two years earlier, Greene's story concerned a village poacher and Boer War veteran, who single-handedly foils the Nazis attempt to invade a sleepy rural English village. In the hands of Ealing writers John Dighton, Diana Morgan and Angus MacPhail, only the central premise is really kept, placing the action in fictional Bramley End (in reality, Turville, Oxfordshire) where the village squire Wilsford (Leslie Banks) has plotted with the Nazis, allowing a troop to surreptitiously arrive in the village disguised…
WENT THE DAY WELL? 1942, Albert Cavalcanti.
I was gobsmocked when I saw this in film school and it's still the damndest thing. A British WWIl propaganda film (written by Graham Greene) made when the outcome of the war was far from certain. Yet it radiates English manners and Ealing comic set pieces. In the film, German paratroopers take over an English village and are undone by the populace and the Home Guard--after considerable bloodshed.
The Americans were making strident "Why We Fight" docs while the Brits, in far greater peril, were serving tea and crumpets with their resistance. This, combined with Humphrey Jennings' docs, makes British films singular in the history of war propaganda. Film Forum is showing it as part of their Ealing series. It's also available on Apple and Amazon.
Cinematic Time Capsule
1942 Marathon - Film #73
”I can’t believe we’re not in the middle of a most terrible nightmare.”
When a group of British soldiers arrive in the small, fictitious English village of Bramley End it’s not long before the villagers begin to suspect something’s wrong… and then faster than you can say “Great Bars of Chokolade” they’re suddenly witnessing the Red Dawn of WWII.
Cavalcanti’s war pic is a presumptious rallying cry for England that continuously lulls you into a false sense of security and then brutally smacks you upside the head with hatchet of shocking reality. And I can only imagine that seeing this picture in 1942 must have been the cinema equivalent of watching Inglourious…
RECOMMENDED BY Jacob
While there has always been stylistic films even back on the silent era, there's no doubt Ealing Studios have been one the first to have a brand of their own. Their use of particular dry, very British humor with some quite interesting, often creative stories or takes into familiar territory, makes every and each of their things worth at least a watch. And this film is not an excuse.
Based on a Graham Greene story, a small town finds out Hitler and his Nazi troupes are trying to invade their place and they go full in to take them out and down. If the premise sounds anything familiar its because in many ways, I can see this…
2nd Alberto Cavalcanti (after 'Christmas Party' and 'Ventriloquist' segments in Dead of Night)
Went the Day Well? is marked out from other UK propaganda cinema of WW2 for its unrelenting brutality. The cheery optimism of films like Love on the Dole and Millions Like Us, with their messages of sticking together so England will prevail, is savagely undercut by the shocking violence at hand. Old women are bayoneted, society matrons are blown up by hand-grenades and rows of Home Guards are machine gunned as they cycle by. It's a cruel film, one made crueler by the apparent sunniness of the village before they wake up to the terror at hand- namely, they're being invaded by a Nazi beachhead in preparation…
Surprisingly dark and gripping. It kind of transcends its wartime propaganda purpose, eschewing happy jingoism and instead going for the grittier what if some Nazi’s pretended to be British officers and took over a British village ahead of a planned invasion approach and ends up being a really effective thriller.
Which is crazily well done considering the wrap-around narration, that throws the story into flashback, pretty much tells you how its going to end. But I think that’s one of the ways it plays with your expectations. You think it means all the characters you get introduced to will be safe, but this film has no problem killing grandmas and shooting kids. It is surprisingly brutal, sometimes in fun ways…
Release date: December 7, 1942
Don’t interfere with the British and their tea time; this was a hard lesson for those German spies.
The film opens with a happy-go-lucky townsman explaining earlier in a past year during springtime, the silly Germans tried to capture a town in the heart of England, a town they intended to be the lynchpin of their invasion plans.
Naturally, the Brits fought them and won.
Surprisingly, or shockingly, an exceedingly high number of the townsfolk died in fighting the Germans. I suppose the Government War Office requested a realistic war film to stiffen the backbones of the Home Guard and the civilians.
This is still 1942, so every schoolboy and old maid needs to know…
One of the great British films of World War Two: a chilling ‘what if’ about German paratroopers invading an idyllic rural village. It’s eerie, gripping, deeply moving, with a revealing matter-of-factness about death, and a heartwarming message about how important it is to shoot Nazis – real steel beneath the rhapsodic bucolicism.
There’s a moment here that reduces me to tears every time I see it, or even think of it, in which a privileged, self-satisfied aristocrat sees a grenade fall into a room full of kids and does the only thing she can think of. Is that just propaganda or postwar utopianism beginning to bud?
It's quite a thrill to watch a film on nitrate stock that hasn't been exhibited publicly for 80 years, in the knowledge that at any moment its flammability might cause an evacuation from the cinema. God bless the BFI for continuing to bring these treasures to us - they're only one of two venues in Europe that have the safety mechanisms in place to permit such a screening. And it does feel an honour to watch these beautiful prints that have survived through the decades against the odds.
Of course it doesn't hurt that the film in question is such a copper-bottomed classic. It may be a little iffy in terms of editing and soundtracking finesse but that can be…
A strange piece of British propaganda from mid-WWII, that begins in a graveyard at an indeterminate time shortly after the end of the war before flashing back to 1942. Nazis in the guise of British soldiers swarm a town under the pretense of shoring up defense preparedness. The ruse works…for a while. This is a wild movie that has no right to be as strange as it is, as a piece of propaganda you would expect more jingoism and I guess we get that in the backlash by those scrappy Brits but what a circuitous route we take to that inevitable resolution. Some really dark stuff in here despite not showing any of the gory particulars. Great cast. Definitely worth a watch. I saw this 2 months ago and my brain is mush.
Edgar Wright wasn’t the first director to turn a quiet English village into a battle zone.
Alberto Cavalcanti did it in 1942. Went the Day Well? depicts a surprise attack in the English countryside.
Wright Tweeted in September 2020,
"Went The Day Well? is an astonishing film and frankly I am amazed I didn't see it before we made Hot Fuzz. It's a dark slice of 'what if' rural wartime action and one of the best British movies of all time."
It is quite an unusual movie, and well worth your time. This is a war movie that was made in the hardest days of World War II, when the threat of a German land invasion of England was real.…
