It Happened Here
Tags: alternate history, murder

Plot synopsis:
=== Setting ===
The film opens with the statement: "The German invasion of Britain took place in 1940 after the retreat from Dunkirk." After months of fierce resistance and brutal reprisals, the occupying forces manage to restore order, largely suppressing the resistance movement. However, due to demands from the Ural Mountains front, most German troops are eventually removed from Western Europe, and the garrisoning of Britain is largely carried out by local volunteers to the German army and the SS.
England appears to be governed by the British Union of Fascists (the situation in the rest of the British Isles is unclear but presumably similar); the followers are referred to as "Blackshirts", wear uniforms with the Flash and Circle, and a framed portrait of Oswald Mosley appears in a government building, alongside one of Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the United States, having entered the war, stations its U.S. Seventh Fleet off Ireland. The Americans begin bombing raids on the southwest coast of England, as well as supplying men and equipment to a resurgent partisan movement.
=== Story ===
Set in 1944–1945, the story focuses on an apolitical Irish district nurse, Pauline. Following an upsurge in partisan activity in her area, she is forcibly evacuated from her village by the Germans and their collaborators and witnesses an attack on German forces by a group of British partisans, during which a number of her friends from the village are killed in the crossfire. The attack (and more particularly the deaths) influences her subsequent views and decisions.
She is evacuated to London, where she reluctantly becomes a collaborator, joining the medical wing of the Immediate Action Organisation (IAO), a kind of quasi-paramilitary medical corps and is re-trained as an ambulance attendant. Although at first reluctant and intent on remaining apolitical, Pauline begins to show the effects of fascist indoctrination in her behaviour. It is a reunion with old friends (an antifascist doctor and his wife) that gives Pauline pause and when she subsequently discovers they are harbouring an injured partisan she reluctantly agrees to help.
Gradually Pauline learns more about the impacts of the German occupation and she sees her friends arrested. The discovery of her association with the antifascist couple by her superiors in the IAO leads to her demotion and transfer to another part of the country. She welcomes the move at first, as her new job appears to have less of the paramilitary trappings. However Pauline discovers that she has unwittingly taken part in a forced euthanasia programme and killed a group of foreign forced labourers who had contracted tuberculosis.
The film ends with Pauline being arrested after protesting and refusing to continue but before she can be put on trial, she is captured by the resurgent British Resistance and agrees to work for them as they fight to liberate the country with the help of arriving American troops. In the finale, Pauline tends a group of wounded partisans while, out of her view, a large group of soldiers from the Black Prince Regiment of the British Legion of the Waffen-SS who had surrendered are summarily shot, a scene reminiscent of an SS massacre of civilians earlier in the film.

Review: 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.
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..
`It Happened Here' Directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo is a Classic of British Cinema.
The Film is remarkable in its authenticity, given the fictional scenario, the invasion of Britain by the Nazis during World War Two. The look of the Picture is very raw and earthy which adds to its realistic style.The German soldiers look perfect, I say this because it is so rare that Directors make such a concerted effort for perfection.Andrew Mollo and Kevin Brownlow are two of the most talented and unrecognized Directors in Britain.
This Film is an example of the best of British Independent Film making and should be seen..
The documentary footage of Nazi soldiers parading around London etc appears ever so real.
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.
The film presents the Partisans as terrorists, whose methods differ little from the Nazis, although their objectives are purer.
What's most amazing about this film is that it was made by teenagers and looks good even for being shot in 16mm.
The narrative loses a lot of steam after an hour (I think this film was expanded from a short) but the faked newsreel shown in a cinema halfway through the movie is totally flawless in its imitation of German propaganda films..
Nightmarish, stomach-churning fantasy of what England would have been like under German occupation.
A thought-provoking war drama, which began life as the spare-time project of an 18-year-old film-lover and his 16-year-old friend.
Based on the counter-factual premise that Britain was successfully invaded following the Dunkirk retreat and liberated by the Americans at the end of World War II.
It is a film concerned with what war and military occupation does to people's minds.
The way ID cards/papers were used, the attitude of some people that collaborated, and the resistance starting to fight back, it was just brilliant.I'd love to see it again,let's hope it is screened on TV but I don't remember seeing it on TV to date, unless it was during the 80's when I was working abroad..
It certainly makes you think about how it might have been had Hitler succeeded.The book 'How It Happened Here' is due to be re-issued with a revised content and updates.The new book 'How It Happened Here' should be out in August but check availability on amazon or at the publishers website ukapress.comThe DVD for this film is also available now with a great review on dvdtalk.com http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s100here.htmlIn all, it's a film that hasn't had enough exposure.
Being a Londoner, and born but a few months after England declared war onGermany, 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.
In his book, "How It Happened Here", co-director, Kevin Brownlow explains how he got the idea tomake this film.
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 Happened Here' is the only British war film which gives a true and accurate idea of what war is about: it is about civilians.All war films, with the exception of this one and a tiny handful of others, deal with boys in their uniforms shooting at each other in glorious Technicolour.
with having to collaborate to a varying extent in order to earn a living, in fact with the real dilemmas which only those who lived through the Nazi occupation can truly understand.
Collaboration is a slippery slope, well handled in the film as it is too in the French film 'Lacombe Lucien', where a feckless young man, rebuffed by the resistance, slips almost accidentally into collaboration for a bit of an adventure and some status.A recent article in the London press explained that the lengthy disquisition on the necessity of fascism in occupied Britain, as voiced by an English militiaman in the film, was in fact a pro-fascist argument put forward by a real leading British fascist, who made use of the film to expound his views.
This argument appealed to many 'right-thinking' people in occupied Europe as, barely a couple of years after the war, many right-thinking people thought that the communist menace should be eliminated.As a result of the filmed fascist diatribe, United Artists ordered Brownlow to remove this section (6 minutes, I think) and the film was originally screened without it.When the resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq is labelled terrorism, well, that is exactly what the German occupiers said about all resistance movements in Europe.
At the end of the war, these movements settled scores with collaborators and presumed collaborators, with unofficial executions running into the tens of thousands.Nothing wrong then, in having the British resistance in this film shown as behaving mercilessly.
Upon first viewing It Happened Here, I was struck by the poor quality of the film.
After reading of Brownlow's financial struggles in making the film, I'm awed at his creative use of available funds.
The British of this film can be seen in its careful (and to most, slow) development.If one, however, wishes to view an artistic film (and has the patience and culture to do so), I would highly recommend It Happened Here.
Well that's what happens in the 21st Century but away back in the mid 1950s two ambitious amateur film makers Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo pulled out all the stops to make an alternative neo-realist film featuring a scenario where Operation Sealion was a success and Britain is under the fascist jackboot and these two idealists managed to pull out all the stops .
All I really know about the behind the scenes story is that it took them eight years and seven thousand pounds sterling of their own finance to produce it From a technical point of view IT HAPPENED HERE is somewhat crude .
Filmed in black and white it resists the temptation to intercut real life footage of the second world war and instead everything on screen is pre-filmed for the camera .
Be thankful that democracy doesn't allow such people to rise to the top .If there's one problem with the film's politics it's equating the resistance not being all that different from the methods employed by the fascists and the film is book ended in that both sides have the justification of "If you're not for us you're against us".
I can understand what the makers are trying to do but is it actually true that "The appalling thing about fascism is that you've got to use fascist methods to get rid of it." Presently in Syria the Kurdish YPG and their Arab comrades in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are engaged in a war against Daesh and the fascist Assad government who are backed by proxies from Russia , Iran and Turkey and yet never stoop to the methods of the regime they are fighting .
Fascists use the word "Jewry" while leftists use the word "Zionists" and only the phraseology is different If nothing else IT HAPPENED HERE gives an interesting window on the world of what things would be like if the Nazis had won the Battle Of Britain .
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.
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..
A previous reviewer couldn't recommend the film too highly and said you owe it to yourself to see this.I can't go along with that.A lot of British people have tried to cheer themselves up with the thought that Hitlerism could never have taken root in Britain, because we're all so jolly decent and we'd never have put up with Onkel Adi.This film does a pretty good job of saying "Bull***t!" to that idea.
Collaborating with the occupying power is a fairly obvious strategy for people who want a quiet life, or hope for advancement in the new society, because they don't believe that the occupation will be defeated.And if state-managed news media tell you only what they want you to hear, and portray things in an extremely odd light, then it's not surprising that people start to believe this stuff and spout it themselves.The basic narrative device is to follow the adventures of an Irish nurse who claims to have little experience of or interest in politics.
Men and women are capable of much worse than they think; fascism is a disease so virulent that one needs to adopt some of its own methods to have a chance of defeating it, and very few people are immune to its temptations (especially when agreement makes for a much less uncomfortable life).It's a very earnest film, but it isn't very interesting dramatically.
Think about it...Kevin Brownlow was 19 and his friend, Andrew Mollow, 16 when they started making a film.
Using lots of seemingly documentary footage and mostly non-professional actors, they made an alternative history film that looks for all the world like a traditional documentary.
While this notion offended many when the film debuted in 1966, this was a realistic scenario, as locals did work hand in hand with the Nazis in many countries--such as in France and the Ukraine.
According to the film, these local fascists were needed because the war against the Soviets was not going well and they needed all the troops they could spare (just like what really happened in WWII).The story focuses on an Irish nurse who goes to work with the fascist British government.
Because writer/director Brownlow was filming this on the cheap, he used 16mm film and the sound was often quite poor--especially at the beginning.
I also was very impressed with the pro-Nazi propaganda film that was shown in the theater--it looked quite real.
Like Peter Watkin's "The War Game" which came out around the same time and which imagined life, or what was left of it, in Britain after a nuclear attack, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's "It Happened Here" imagines a Britain under the jackboot as if Hitler had succeeded in invading after the retreat at Dunkirk and like "The War Game" is filmed as if it were a documentary.
Interestingly, it shows that the British resistance could be just as brutal as the Germans are usually shown in this kind of film, making this the perfect companion piece to Cavalcanti's masterpiece "Went the Day Well"..
We owe a debt of gratitude to Brownlow & Mollo for the making of this film.
I had never seen it until today, Dec25th 2011.It's a remarkable film especially when you consider it's meagre budget (said to have been $20,000), the ages of the film's makers, who were 18 & 16 and the eight years it took to produce.
The attention to detail is meticulous; the cinematography is inspirational; the subject matter is horrific and so very nearly came to pass; the poor sound quality and grainy black & white adds to the realism; the dark and brooding scenes are terribly atmospheric.I was born in 1949, close enough to the end of World War II to almost feel I was a part of it.
Anyone who thinks it glorifies Fascism and is anti-Semitic has missed the point completely.First thing tomorrow I'm going to post it to my 16year old granddaughter studying Government & Politics.
It should be made a compulsory part of the school curriculum.I can't thank Brownlow & Mollo enough for making this film and am just so sorry it took so long to discover it..
A very special film about something that never happened but it could have happen: the conquest of Britain by Nazi Germany.
All the actors do an excellent job, not about to play a role, you say that everything is filmed "live", every character in their daily life under the occupation of Hitler's army.
But not one does look so real like this film looks, whose subject is not true at all..
IT HAPPENED HERE (Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, 1965) ***.
It presents an interesting conjecture, to be sure, but one wonders what point was being made so long after the threat had been nipped in the bud, as it wereunless an analogous contemporaneous scenario (say, the Communist oppression rife in Eastern European countries) was being addressed!Anyway, the background to the movie under review is itself worth documenting: writer/director/cinematographer/editor Brownlow is best- known as a champion of film preservation (whose sterling work in the field was recently rewarded with an Honorary Oscar!); he was slated to introduce a September 2002 screening I attended of Erich von Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH (1928) at London's National Film Theatre but he eventually relegated it to an underling!
Besides, Brownlow and his collaborator Mollo were still in their teens when they began work on IT HAPPENED HERE – which took some 7 years to complete!
Bad acting, poor visuals, in fact nothing could count as slightly favorable.Perhaps only British people gave it good reviews, but I cannot..
I never knew this movie existed and I am still somewhat shocked after just watching this film at the incredible job that was done by a couple of independent film-makers.If someone had told me prior to seeing this movie that a couple of teenagers had produced an amazing movie based on the occupation of England by the Nazis in World War II, I would have said impossible.The movie lacks a little in quality because it was shot in 16mm and in some situations lacks the necessary lighting needed to bring off certain scenes, however, as the Summary above states, you can choose only ONE of the three criteria to work with.
The producers did not have budget, or top quality equipment, or big name actors to work with, but they DID have time and they used it to create what can only be called a masterpiece.I have never lived in a country under occupation and I hope that I never will, however, I can understand the need for people to get on with their lives and even the necessity to actually collaborate with an enemy simply to survive.As it was put to our main actress in this movie, "You can nurse for us or you can stay home and nurse your empty stomach." She had no choice even though she wanted no political affiliation.
I don't hand out 1's and 10's often, and while the production on this film is quite low, with the sound quality for dialogue being the absolute worst, this film is totally compelling and you will be grateful you gave it a chance.The movie is shot as a pseudo documentary, following the life of Pauline, a strangely attractive nurse who must relocate to London in a world where Nazi Germany has more than a foothold in England; Soldiers occupy the nation and many British citizens have become their collaborators.
You should read the interesting history behind the making of this film which took something like 6 years to complete, if you can believe it.
You see the daily life of citizens in a country where all their normal daily routines have been stamped out and they are recast in the roles of pseudo-Nazis whether they like it or not.
It Happened Here starts off stunningly, perfectly recreating a newsreel/fly on the wall documentary style with convincing recreations of German occupation and naturalistic acting.Warning, possible spoilerAs the plot develops, however, it introduces a "need to use fascist methods to overcome fascism" theme that is clumsily handled until, in the unconvincing ending, the anti-Nazi partisans are made out to be every bit as loathsome as their enemies.