Alberto Cavalcanti (1942)
‘Went the day well?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
Went the day well?’
According to Wikipedia, this:
‘… epitaph is by the Greek scholar John Maxwell Edmonds. and originally appeared in The Times dated February 6th 1918, page 7, under a short section headed Four Epitaphs. It is the second of four epitaphs composed for graves and memorials to those fallen in battle – each covering different situations of death.’
The verse provides the epigraph to this Ealing Studios film, for which John Dighton wrote the screenplay (with Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan), adapted from a short story by Graham Greene called The Lieutenant Died Last. I’d seen Went the Day Well? maybe twice before but was ashamed to realise I’d not previously appreciated it was made during rather than shortly after the end of World War II. It’s an absorbing action drama but it’s as propaganda that the film is remarkable.
The story of a German occupation of an English village called Bramley End and the locals’ resistance and resilience, Went the Day Well? has none of the soaring, sentimental rhetoric of Mrs Miniver, made in Hollywood in the same year (and released in America less than six months after Pearl Harbor). It’s both starker and more nuanced than I remember the William Wyler movie as being: people, including people that in the course of the picture we get to know and like, or at least respect, get shot or blown up. Cavalcanti’s direction is both gripping and poetic: while the momentum is relentless, he keeps reminding us of the beauty and vulnerability of the English countryside – the birdsong, the meadows and hedgerows, the imperilled sunshine (the film is brilliantly lit by Wilkie Cooper). If this were simply a dramatic narrative, you’d be surprised how soon the Germans – who are posing as British soldiers (with, for the most part, improbably impeccable accents) – are unmasked. Even as propaganda, it seems surprising at first that more time isn’t spent comparing and contrasting how the more or less vigilant people of Bramley End are or are not picking up on the telltale signs. Then you realise that it makes complete sense to get swiftly into the business of describing the villagers’ resourceful, necessarily violent fightback. Although made with artistry, Went the Day Well? is chiefly concerned with giving practical moral advice.
This is a British film of the period where the limitations of the stylised acting can be overlooked because the urgency of the subject and story is so great. And, although the ethos of the film might seem to be conventionally patriotic, it has some challenging and subversive strands. It’s the local squire Oliver Wilsford who turns out to be the fifth columnist in the community. Women, as well as men, have to commit acts of violence – and their responses are very different. While the postmistress Mrs Collins kills a Nazi officer with a sense of compulsive but fearful duty, Ivy Dawking, one of the staff of servants in the big house where much of the action takes place, eagerly positions her rifle as if taking out Germans will be even more fun than shooting for prizes at a fair.
A good few members of the NFT3 audience seemed to be laughing almost continuously. Perhaps plenty of people did so in 1942 as well – but there was something disrespectful in these affectionate BFI chuckles: they seemed to express a confusion of facile nostalgia for a more clear-cut moral landscape and a lost, heroic era of British history, with a condescending amusement at the style of the film and the playing. I wasn’t immune from these feelings myself but Cavalcanti wiped the smile off my face quite quickly. For example, the appearance of the Home Guard in Bramley End can’t help connoting Dad’s Army – yet the local defence men end up as corpses here. So too, and heroically, does another natural figure of fun nowadays, the vicar.
Good performances by Mervyn Johns (as a workman-cum-verger, who also introduces and concludes the story), Leslie Banks (the squire), Thora Hird (Ivy Dawking), Patricia Hayes (some kind of assistant to the postmistress), and, at least when she kills the German soldier, Muriel George (Mrs Collins); also with C V France (as the vicar), Marie Lohr (a posh woman who becomes a real heroine), Harry Fowler (a plucky teenager) and John Slater (one of the Germans). The acting of Valerie Taylor, as the vicar’s daughter Nora, is very much of its time and clarse but, because of what Nora feels about Wilsford, Taylor is very affecting in her final act. The music is by William Walton.
13 July 2010
