It Happened Here (1964)

A fascinating Second World War drama that examines what might have happened if the Germans had won the Battle of Britain and Hitler had successfully invaded the UK.

German troop transports rattle past thatched cottages, riots explode on fascist-controlled London streets, and reels of Nazi propaganda unspool with reassuring tones of Pathe News.

A nurse named Pauline (Pauline Murray) allows herself to be persuaded to join a Fascist organisation in order to work. She is a weary country widow who has seen her village neighbours mowed down by the Nazis in retaliation for a wild audacity by an isolated member of the resistance.

She is a helpless bystander who has been evacuated to London to get her away from an area of potential resistance, and she has to do something to get a job.

What she does is enrol as a nurse in the English Volunteer Legion, which is a paramilitary organisation that is compelled to undergo and endure all the heel-clicking, arm saluting rituals of the Nazi overlords, listen to their brainwashing lectures, and attend their fiery funerals.

Renting a room in a basement owned by Dr Richard Fletcher (Sebastian Shaw) and his wife Helen (Fiona Leland), both covert anti-fascists, she takes part in a conversation in which Fletcher ends up declaring, “The appalling thing about fascism is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it. We’ve all got a bit of it in us. And it doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface.”

The family are secretly harbouring a wounded partisan fighter, but they are eventually discovered and arrested. Pauline’s experience as a nurse excuses her from suffering the same fate, but she is sent out to the country to work in a remote hospice.

At first, with its cheery birdsong and almost empty wards, it seems like a cushy posting, until a party of Eastern European workers with tuberculosis, including a small child, are brought in for inoculation.

Pauline is asked to vaccinate them, but discovers the next morning that the injections were lethal, and she has unwittingly taken part in an official euthanasia programme. It’s all part of what Dr Walton, the head of the centre, calls ‘a great cleansing operation’ of the sick and infirm.

Begun by teenagers Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo in 1956 as a hobby (most of the cast were volunteers), It Happened Here finally opened in 1966 at a West End cinema. Stanley Kubrick loved the film and donated film stock from Dr Strangelove to help Brownlow and Mollo finish it.

Details of Nazi-occupied Britain are skilfully imagined:

In Westminster, a Jewish ghetto has been created behind barbed wire; the wireless pours out German Schlager; posters advertise job opportunities in Germany; tin-hatted police officers work on the streets hand in glove with Wehrmacht infantrymen, who sample English tea with suspicion and hilarity.

On a propaganda newsreel, the new European union between England and Germany is celebrated, reminding viewers that the two nations had already fought side by side against Napoleon at Waterloo.

The invading Reich seduces rather than crushes its victim; the bitter enmity is gone, replaced by a common cause against communism.

There are major flaws, naturally, mainly in the performances and the often naive writing, but forgive them. Instead, marvel at the provocative sight of the Third Reich goose-stepping down Whitehall and chill to the fascist overthrow of Little England.

Pauline
Pauline Murray
Dr Richard Fletcher
Sebastian Shaw
Helen Fletcher
Fiona Leland
Honor Hutton
Honor Fehrson
Immediate Action (IA) Commandant
Percy Binns
IA Political Leader
Frank Bennett
IA Group Leader
Bill Thomas
IA Medical Officer
Reginald Marsh
IA NCO
Rex Collett
IA Commandant
Nicolette Bernard
IA Group Leader Moorfield
Nicholas Moore

Director
Kevin Brownlow
Andrew Mollo