It Happened Here

If you look up the 1965 release It Happened Here in the Guinness Book of Records you'll discover that it holds the record for the longest film production: Eight years with another year's wait for it to hit the cinemas.

It's a story that deserves to be turned into a movie of its own. Produced, written, and directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, who were 18 and 16-years old when they started work on the film, It Happened Here doesn't seem very impressive in its opening scenes; a load of stock footage carefully selected to give the impression of a successful Nazi invasion and occupation of Britain in 1941. Unimpressive, that is, if you don't know that Brownlow and Mollo didn't use an inch of stock footage, but got their effects by using a 16 mm camera to shoot their huge cast of hundreds that included only two paid actors. The rest were volunteers; many of them science fiction fans who were willing to give up their spare time out of fascination with the film's alternative history plot line.

Ostensibly, It Happened Here is the story Pauline, a district nurse who is evacuated to the "demilitarised" city of London after resistance fighting breaks out near her village. Once in the half-destroyed capital, which has Germans the way some people have mice, Pauline discovers that the only way she can find work is by joining the local Fascist party; a step that brings her face to face with the horrors of the new order while alienating her from her old friends.

All that, however, is just a framework on which Brownlow and Mollo can hang their extended scenes of Britain under Fascist rule. It's a world of hordes of Wehrmacht soldiers sightseeing around London, relentless martial music of Prussian stridency, and endless speeches by blackshirted English fascists (a couple of them the real thing!) as they harangue the masses about Jewish inferiority and the unbreakable bond of Anglo-German friendship. These scenes are a mixed bag and often go on far too long. I came away thinking that the simple image on the DVD cover of German soldiers parading outside the Palace of Westminster had far more impact because of its economy. Despite having spent eight years, Brownlow and Mollo weren't entirely certain what the film was about. Was it a story of Britain conquered by the Nazis or was it an examination of Fascism? In the early part of the film it seems the former, but the latter dominates the last half of the film as we're shown an England where the population grab onto Nazism with such enthusiasm that they make the Vichy French look like the Finns as Englishmen left and right start sieg heiling, rounding up Jews, joining the Wehrmacht, and committing genocide with the worst of them. What the British government in exile or the Royal family were up to while these shenanigans were going on is left unexplained. At some points, it reads like those insane "histories" of the war written in the '80s that, with a straight face, condemned the British for the crimes of collaboration that they didn't commit because they weren't conquered.

Still, this is an important film. Not only are many of the images unforgettable, but it stands out as the first of the alternative history dramas that would soon lead to more polished works like An Englishman's Castle, Fatherland and a very cool Doctor Who episode that featured not only British Fascists in eye patches, but subterranean werewolves.

What more could you ask for?