Went the Day Well? is a 1942 British war film adapted from a story by Graham Greene and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. It was produced by Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios and served as unofficial propaganda for the war effort. The film shows a village in southern England taken over by German paratroopers, reflecting the greatest fear of the British public of the time, although the threat of German invasion had largely receded. The film is notable for its unusually, for the time, frank depiction of ruthless violence.

Plot

The story is told in flashback by Charles Sims. During the Second World War, a group of seemingly authentic British soldiers arrive in the small, fictitious English village of Bramley End. The film's title is based on an epitaph written by the classical scholar John Maxwell Edmonds. It originally appeared in The Times on 6 February 1918 entitled "Four Epitaphs".

"Went the day well" also appeared in an unidentified newspaper cutting in a scrapbook now held in the RAF Museum (AC97/127/50), and in a collection of First World War poems collated by Vivien Noakes.

Casting

This was the first significant role of Thora Hird's career, and one of the last for C. V. France.

Filming

Exterior scenes were shot on location in the village of Turville in Buckinghamshire.

It was once known as They Came in Khaki. Anthony Quinn, a film critic for The Independent on Sunday, commented in 2010, "It subtly captures an immemorial quality of English rural life—the church, the local gossip, the sense of community—and that streak of native 'pluck' that people believed would see off Hitler".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of 14 critics' reviews are positive.

Legacy

In 2005 it was named as one of the "100 Greatest War Films" in a poll by Britain's Channel 4. The 1975 book, The Eagle Has Landed and the later film use some of the same ideas. When the restored film opened at Film Forum in New York City in 2011, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it "undeservedly forgotten... [H]ome-front propaganda has rarely seemed so cutthroat or so cunning".

Home media

The film was released on DVD by StudioCanal in 2011, with Cavalcanti's Yellow Caesar and a 2010 BBC Radio 3 profile of the main feature by Simon Heffer as extras. It was subsequently included in the StudioCanal Blu-Ray boxset "Their Finest Hour: 5 British WWII Classics" in March 2020.

See also

  • Operation Sea Lion, Germany's planned invasion of Britain in 1940
  • The House at Sea's End (Ruth Galloway,#3), 2010 novel by Elly Griffiths, dealing with a crime that occurred during the time of this film and that may be related to the events the film described

References

Sources

  • Houston, Penelope. Went the Day Well? London: BFI, 1992,