Went the Day Well

Went the Day Well – A group of German paratroopers infiltrate the British countryside and rendezvous with an aristocratic member of the home-grown Fifth Column (an insinuating performance of veiled malice by Leslie Warren. The German troops take hostages in a tiny village, Bramly End. The English fight back and the German invaders are slaughtered. Alberto Cavalcanti directed this rabblerousing and grimly effective piece of war propaganda for release in 1942 and the film is famous for its relentless violence: a vicar is shot ringing an alarm bell, women are killed, and the Germans are hacked to death with axes, crushed under deadfalls, knifed, strangled, and shot from ambush. The German commandant threatens reprisals – he says he will shoot five children at dawn – and a ferocious battle ensues. As Home Guard troops advance to rescue the villagers, the hostages, armed with guns taken from dead Germans, are besieged in a stately manor house where a fire-fight with machine guns and hand grenades is waged from room to room. As we are told at the film’s outset, the only piece of England conquered by the Germans is a mass grave in the cemetery of the country church -- we see Teutonic names inscribed under an ominous-looking stone cross. Although the ending of the film is reassuringly signaled in the picture’s first frames – we are shown the grave and a narrator tells us that the Germans have been killed – the film’s suspense is in learning which of the likeable avuncular townsfolk will end up dead as well. The answer is lots of them, including the grand dame of the manor house who throws herself on a live grenade to save the children that she is defending in an upstairs drawing room in her home. Based on a short story by Graham Greene, the film is certainly effective in a primitive and bloodthirsty way. The German invaders bully the kindhearted and peaceable townspeople until they start fighting back – and, then, all hell breaks out. Although the outcome is never in serious doubt, the film’s suspense is based upon desperate efforts by the townsfolk to send messages to the outside world – measures that all seem to fail until the hostages begin to start killing Germans with their own hands. There is lots of throat-slitting and bludgeoning and the Germans are suitably barbaric foils to the oppressed townspeople. The film’s agenda seems to be a proof that all strata in the English class system must join together to repel the loathsome invaders – the shabby lower-caste man that we have seen poaching on manor house land in the opening of the film, guns down Germans with his fowling piece and the timorous women in the village prove to be good shots with rifle and revolver. The sinister Fifth columnist, portrayed with oily charm, is shot full of holes by his own girlfriend whilst he endeavors to open the doors to the Germans assaulting the manor house. There’s very little plot exterior to the main thrust of the action – that is, murderous violence used to repel invaders – and no social commentary, romance, or comedy. In its single-minded way, the film reminds me of Griffith’s Battle of Elderbrush Gulch and the famous climax to a The Birth of a Nation – a group of people related by marriage and family is besieged in a house that is increasingly embattled, forced into ever smaller and more tenuous defensive positions by their barbaric enemies, and, then, saved at the very last minute. This is a primitive formula for a film but one works on chthonic impulses in the viewer. You can’t look away from this thing. I imagine the effect on people in wartime Britain must have been galvanic.