It Happened Here

Directors: Kevin Brownlow/ Andrew Mollo, PG, 1966

Stars: Pauline Murray, Fiona Leland, Sebastian Shaw

Out to buy on DVD

A landmark in low-budget British cinema, It Happened Here imagines what might have happened if the Nazis had occupied Britain during the Second World War. While Panzer tanks roll through Trafalgar Square and stormtroopers crowd on to Tube trains, a resistance movement slowly builds in the rural West Country.

Brownlow and Mollo use a mostly unknown cast, as well as chilling conversations with real British fascists to create a riveting hybrid of docudrama and propaganda newsreel. The influence of the “kitchen sink” films and the French New Wave is evident in the open-ended style, but there are also undertones of Orwell and Kubrick in the film’s bitter depiction of one nation under a jackboot.