I Watch Films: Went The Day Well
Went The Day Well
It’s the Whitsun weekend of 1942 and the tiny British village of Bramley End is visited by a group of British soldiers, engineers. What are they doing? Well it’s the war, it’s classified. The inhabitants – mostly older men and women with a handful of children and young women – are getting ready for a wedding, between a local girl and a sailor on leave.
The soldiers are actually Germans, looking for an isolated spot to put up a radio or radar jammer to cover an invasion of Britain. Billeted amongst the villagers, eventually they notice that something is wrong, but by this time they are all under guard. This is facilitated by a German agent, who is the village squire*. They try to get messages out, but most of them fail; the vicar tries to ring the church bell but is shot. (The film is quite violent for a 1942 drama).
In the end (as we know from the framing story) the Germans are revealed and the villagers rise up. Women and men, old and young, posh and common. This was not an official film, yet it would not be wrong to call it propaganda. And a fine piece too, with a few interesting characters amongst the stereotypes, some tension and well-framed action scenes. A classic of British war films.
Watch This: Classic British war film, about sacrifice and
duty and betrayal
Don’t Watch This: Fuels paranoia about fifth columnists
* He’s not the Lord of the Manor, Mrs Fraser lives in the big house, her husband is dead or away. Anyway he’s posher than most of the villagers, and so takes a lead, pretending to negotiate with the German commander.
