Went the Day Well?

Leslie Banks - Oliver Wilsford
Basil Sydney - Major Ortler
Marie Lohr - Mrs Frazer
Valerie Taylor - Nora
C.V. France - Vicar
Frank Lawton - Tom Sturry
Mervyn Johns - Sims
David Farrar - German officer
Harry Fowler - George Truscott
Patricia Hayes - Daisy
Thora Hird - Land Girl

Went the Day Well? was Alberto Cavalcanti's first Ealing feature, the story was by Graham Greene who worked on the script with Dighton, MacPhail and Diana Morgan. Went the Day Well?, a title taken from English Classicist John Maxwell Edmonds lines, 'Went the Day Well? We died and never knew, But well or ill, For freedom we died for you,' began in the future, a view of an English churchyard after the war. We are then told by a grave-digger of the events that occurred in the village of Bramley End in the spring of 1942. It is an idyllic rural setting, ancient cottages and a church surrounded by fields tilled since the Doomsday Book, spring flowers in the hedgerows, old oaks and elms bursting into full leaf. The life of the village is self-contained, and war seems a long way away.

Suddenly there is an eruption of military vehicles and the place is swarming with khaki uniforms. Upon arriving in the community, vicious Nazi officer Ortier (Basil Sydney) makes contact with local Fifth Columnist Oliver Wileford (Leslie Banks), using the film's British title as their password, the villagers are told that it is an exercise for the Royal Engineers, and mum's the word. They respond by billeting the soldiers, while the officers are entertained by the gentry. Gradually odd things are noticed. Why do the visitors write the figure seven with a cross stroke? Why has one of them got a bar of chocolate made in Vienna? Why are they so impatient with a small boy? Can it be...! And slowly and horrifyingly the placid community realises that the enemy is in its midst, German paratroops disguised as British soldiers. As the Germans declare themselves the hitherto supposedly pukka British major (Basil Sydney) allows himself an 'Ach, so?'.

The villagers are rounded up and locked in the church, and attempts to summon help are brutally frustrated. The vicar rings a peal on the church bells and is shot; patrolling Home Guards some way off hear the bells and assume it is a mistake, because it is a signal for the arrival of enemy parachutists, and obviously nothing like that could have happened. They are then ambushed by the Germans and wiped out. The village squire is a traitor, a notion so improbable that it has not occurred to the villagers, who look on him as their natural leader. When the vicar's daughter realises, she shoots him down with a service revolver, a shocking act for a well brought-up young Englishwoman. But there is no gentility left - the defenders fight as though possessed, rejoicing at every invader's death. Finally, word reaches the outside world through a small boy (Harry Fowler), a friend of the poacher (Edward Rigby) who has died in the attempt, and the British army moves in and mops up the enemy. The only piece of England that the Germans have gained is the section of the churchyard where their bodies rest.

The story has an affinity with An Englishman's Home, a patriotic play that attempted to sound the bugle call to arms before the First World War. The British home guardsmen and German soldiers seen in the film were drawn from the ranks of of the real-life Gloucestershire Regiment, who volunteered their services for this patriotic morale-booster. A similar theme was used for the film of Jack Higgin's novel, The Eagle Has Landed, the plot of which concerned an assassination attempt on Churchill during a stay in Norfolk. Even the device of the graveyard, with German names on the headstones was used, Went the Day Well? is regarded by Cavalcanti as the best of his Ealing films, with a pacifist idea behind it. In an interview with Elizabeth Sussex in Sight and Sound (Autumn 1975), he said: 'People of the kindest character, such as the people in that small English village, as soon as the war touches them, become absolute monsters.' But the more obvious lesson, the appropriate one for the time that the film was shown, is to be alert and prepared at all times to distrust even the familiar.
Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.