Cinema: Hitler’s Britain

It Happened Here. The German conquest of Britain was bloody but swift. By the end of 1941 the entire island was occupied, and by 1943 the nation had been transformed into a corporate state. British industry was retooled to supply the Wehrmacht, British “volunteers” were fighting on the Russian front. Faced with a Reich that seemed likely indeed to last a thousand years, the country wavered and wondered if it might not be wiser to join the enemy it could not beat.

In this eerily satirical political fantasy, the camera wanders like a Gulliver in an imaginary kingdom, and finds in what never happened a metaphor of what all too often does. Written, produced and directed by two little-known British moviemakers, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, It Happened Here was shot with spare cash ($20,000) in spare time over a period of seven years. Then it was withheld from the public for still another year by distributors who were afraid that some anti-Semitic dialogue, ad-libbed by real-life British fascists, might peeve the public. The dialogue was cut before release, but the film is still incendiary. With ferocious frankness, Brownlow and Mollo propose that the British, by succumbing to the sophistries of reverse racialism, have become entirely too smug about the Germans and their responses to Hitler. Plenty of feet in England or anywhere else, this picture suggests, would feel quite comfortable in jack boots.

The heroine’s feet do not. A middle-aged war widow who has taken up nursing, she is sick to death of all the killing, and decides to support the powers that be for the sake of peace and quiet. She joins the SS nursing corps, but discovers to her horror that SS nurses are better trained to kill than to cure. As her personal tragedy unfolds in the foreground, the national disaster is glimpsed in the background: bobbies accompanied by German tommy gunners, state offices staffed by arrogant blackshirts, press oppressed, radio reduced to martial music and rigged news, ghettos behind barbed wire, extermination depots scattered through England’s green and pleasant land. In the end, the heroine connects with the resistance—and finds it just as brutal as the regime it is resisting.

Actuality is insinuated by the texture of the film, overexposed and grainy as a newsreel, and by a cast of amateurs whose faces wear the perfect unpreventable authenticity of faces in a crowd. Pauline Murray, who plays the nurse, is a professional, but she skillfully conceals her training behind features as natural and untidy as an untied shoe. At every point in this picture, art conceals art so responsibly that fantasy , takes on the force of history.