Paula Murray stars as a Salisbury nurse who - after the defeat of England, circa 1944 - is relocated to London. Unconcerned with politics and eager to help heal the nation's wounds, Paula joins the newly-formed Immediate Action Organization, a Nazi program to indoctrinate the conquered Brits. Drifting through the ranks of the New Order, she witnesses the changes - from the mundane to the horrific - that have befallen her homeland.
The project was begun in 1958 by Kevin Brownlow, who is today best known as a silent-film historian, having restored Abel Gance's Napoleon, authored several books on silent cinema (including The Parade's Gone By) and made numerous TV documentaries: on Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton and, Lon Chaney.
The Herculean task of visualizing Nazi-occupied England was accomplished on a microscopic budget, far removed from the studio system and complicated by the filmmakers' insistence on authenticity in every detail. Not satisfied to merely recreate the look of uniforms and wartime vehicles, Brownlow and Mollo (a military historian) sought the genuine articles. For a scene inside a tuberculosis ward, the filmmakers recruited a group of people actually suffering from the disease.
Unable to afford the professional cast and hundreds of extras essential to an historical epic, they populated their film with amateurs and rallied the support of local townspeople to volunteer their time free of charge (only Sebastian Shaw, as a loyalist doctor, was a professional actor).
As a consequence of Brownlow and Mollo's perfectionism, it took six years to complete It Happened Here. When it finally premiered in the U.S., the distributor, United Artists, removed seven minutes of controversial footage in which a Nazi officer calmly expounds upon the cultural menace of Judaism. In keeping with the film's true-to-life mission, the role is played not by an impersonator but Colin Jordan, a well-known British Neo-Nazi. TCM will present the uncensored directors' cut of It Happened Here.
Greatly enhancing the film's naturalistic "You Are There" effect is the harsh black-and-white photography which exquisitely mimics the government-sponsored British documentaries of the 1940s (such as London Can Take It and The True Glory) which stand as the most immediate and persuasive record of the war in England. Remarkably, no newsreel footage was woven into the newly-filmed recreations.
Every frame is the result of Brownlow and Mollo's painstaking efforts to paint an utterly convincing portrait of British life under the Nazi banner - a purely fictitious film which succeeds in creating a remarkable illusion of authenticity.
Producer, Director and Screenplay: Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky
Editor: Kevin Brownlow
Original Music: Jack Beaver
Principal Cast: Pauline Murray (Paula Murray), Sebastian Shaw (Dr. Richard Fletcher), Honor Fearson (Honor Hutton), Nicholas Moore (IA Group Leader Moorfield), Bart Allison (Skipworth).
BW-97m.
by Bret Wood
