WENT THE DAY WELL? (1942)

It’s such a strange notion, to mark Memorial Day by watching war movies. Not that I can begrudge TCM’s programmers their scheduling the likes of VON RYAN’S EXPRESS and THE GREEN BERETS, but it all seems so in line with the inevitable decline of anniversaries into holidays. Several weeks on from our most recent Day of Remembrance, I’ve been thinking back on a war movie which did mark the start of my Memorial Day weekend movie-watching. What I’ve mentioned was not on my mind when I made the selection; rather, it was the chance to catch the film, Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 British propaganda piece WENT THE DAY WELL?, on its last day showing at Film Forum. A movie which turns civilians into soldiers and an ongoing war into fiction, in its own incongruous, nightmarish way it feels apt for this country’s experience of wartime, at this point in time and for the last seven years.

WENT THE DAY WELL? begins, like good, honest propaganda, by letting the audience know what they are about to see. The camera finds actor Mervyn Johns (Glynis’ father) standing in a churchyard in the rural English village of Bramley End, among tombstones which bear, he informs us, the names of German soldiers who came to this serene outpost from the war disguised as “ordinary British tommies.” By spoiling its own plot, the film provides its first sign that, for all of the entertainment value which it offers, it will operate differently from how a similar story might have been treated before 1938 or after 1945. All that it leaves for us to discover is how its cast of characters, including a priggish vicar’s daughter (Valerie Taylor), a boozy old poacher (Edward Rigby), and an assortment of green Home Guard recruits, could possibly hope to shepherd those invaders into their graves.

The screenwriting team, of John Dighton, Angus MacPhail, and Diana Morgan, answer this question differently than did their source material, Graham Greene’s short story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last.’ Their script marks the second consecutive Greene adaptation that I’ve reviewed here, after Fritz Lang’s 1944 MINISTRY OF FEAR, which doesn’t indicate any further series of posts I’m planning, but simply the kind of coincidence which can occur when you neglect a site for as long as I have. As did Lang’s film, WENT THE DAY WELL? retools Greene’s story to accord with what was deemed more prudent to tell wartime viewers. Greene told the story of a single man, a social outcast from the life of his village, who defends it single-handedly from an advance unit of German paratroopers and receives almost no gratitude in return. The screenplay adaptation completely reverses this notion, showing how nearly every person in that village is prepared to the death to defend it, even those characters you wouldn’t immediately pigeonhole as guerrilla fighters in waiting. It also adds an unsettling note of its own, alongside the juxtaposition of bucolic English countryside with partisan warfare, in the form of those apparent defenders of Bramley End becoming its occupiers. Though in most respects WENT THE DAY WELL? seems to be absolutely of its time, this particular element seems to look forward to the lack of certainty and the paranoia of the 1950s and the Cold War, finding an echo in then-unmade sci-fi movies like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.

Billed here, with eye-catching concision, simply as ‘Cavalcanti,’ the director makes his mark with the story’s gradual progression in tone, and with ominous low-angled shots when one of the most unlikely members of the cast goes on a rampage against the Germans. This scene may be one of the few that I can place in any kind of directorial context, since my previous experience with his large body of work is limited to the two entries he contributed to the famous horror anthology film, DEAD OF NIGHT, one year later, including its concluding and best-known segment, about a ventriloquist tormented by his dummy. Coming up with an image, in the scene mentioned before, which can’t help but now bring to mind some of Kathy Bates in MISERY, Cavalcanti looks forward to his work in the genre by turning a scene of anti-Nazi resistance into horror, and a patriotic insurgent into a monster. WENT THE DAY WELL? touches on other notes you wouldn’t expect from a war film, from the hint of noir in the camerawork and paranoid atmosphere to the definite strain of comedy in the script and performances, seemingly containing most of the genres, which did not include war films, which Cavalcanti would go on to tackle in his British feature-directing career, which began here after a prolific output of documentaries in the country. From what I’ve read, these included the noir of THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE and the comedy of his music hall biopic CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE, but decent copies of his movies on video are still fairly hard to track down. Born in Brazil, from which he later exiled for being a Communist, and at different times also based out of France, Cavalcanti passed a peripatetic career, often without much attention or even without any official credit. Without more of his work being readily available, it’s hard for me to comment more on how he placed his own stamp on this project, except in the almost literal sense of that one-name directorial credit’s appearance over a sedate English countryside. Contrasting with the later, casual use of an anti-Italian ethnic slur by one of the good guys, it’s enough to suggest that we’re watching this story through the eyes of an outsider.

Until I’m more familiar with his work, the auteur of WENT THE DAY WELL? I can most readily identify is not Cavalcanti but his employer, the legendary Ealing Studios. This film’s mysteriously invincible English yeomen could have come from the same gene pool as the indestructible landlady of THE LADYKILLERS and the entrenched management and labor factions of THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, while its mixture of cozy Englishness with industrious violence strikes the same note as KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS. When several unlikely chains of coincidence occur around the midpoint of the story to prevent Bramley End’s inhabitants from warning the rest of England, WENT THE DAY WELL? becomes a guerrilla warfare story identifiably from the same company which made THE LAVENDER HILL MOB.

That whimsical sense of humor exists alongside ruthless violence, both on the part of the characters and of the film toward them, which reminded me most of the 1982 THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS in how unceremoniously characters we’re attached to can fall in combat. Again, it’s something which seems to differ from more traditional war movies, like those late ‘60s examples of the genre I mentioned at the start of this review. For all that WENT THE DAY WELL? is a very untraditional war film, it works very well as one, in that uneasy but unavoidable way in which a catastrophic event like World War II is turned into uplifting entertainment and an inspirational object lesson. In fact, Cavalcanti’s movie takes that tendency to transmute real-life tragedy into fiction, which in something like Howard Hawks’ flag-waver AIR FORCE had wartime audiences hearing that Japanese-Americans took part in the Pearl Harbor attack by land, and takes it another step. That opening narration by Mervyn Johns assumes, like a deadly serious version of the “Dewey defeats Truman” joke, that a land invasion like the one prepared for by the story’s villains will happen, and occurs from a point in time where it has already been defeated. Not unlike INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, this movie creates its own alternate universe version of how Hitler was defeated.

Part of what’s so strange about WENT THE DAY WELL?, as entertainment and as propaganda, might come from Greene’s original story. Despite having been directly written and published in the U.S., in Collier’s, as an assignment from British intelligence to win over American support, Greene couldn’t resist complicating the message. His German invaders don’t disguise themselves as English soldiers, and when they shoot at a boy from the village, Greene tells us that they “humanely” aim at his legs, very unlike the all-out massacre shown in WENT THE DAY WELL? As much as paranoia over Nazis gaining a foothold in England, what you take away from ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ is the main character’s lingering, to him inexplicable guilt over having killed a lot of people to defend his homeland. The German leaders in WENT THE DAY WELL? include Leslie Banks (also the hero of the original THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and Chorus in Olivier’s HENRY V), filmed to emphasize the scars the actor received in World War I combat service, and David Farrar, the darkly handsome Powell & Pressburger regular, and are as vile and duplicitous as you would want movie Nazis to be. As a result, there’s none of Greene’s sense of regret at the deaths of “honorable” enemies, but the movie does give off a sense of unease at how readily and gleefully its heroes turn into killers.

Along with some of the other most memorable British movies of World War II, like HENRY V or THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP, WENT THE DAY WELL? tries to show qualities of England which makes it worth preserving for reasons which don’t have to do with how efficiently it can dispose of its enemies. When one of the villagers, in the sniping scene often used for the movie’s artwork, is briefly reluctant to pick off German soldiers, it could be seen as an insincere moment of hand-wringing, a little concession to the one-time pacifists in the audience. Having liked and enjoyed WENT THE DAY WELL? as much as I did, however, I suppose I’d prefer to see it as another example of the movie’s divided nature; produced as propaganda, under the pressure of a real threat of invasion, it’s a mutant, through-the-looking-glass flag-waving war movie, an Ealing comedy which tranforms into THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. It’s the sort of film where corny provincial humor involving alcoholic poachers and dithery upper-class ladies can exist alongside, late in the story, one of the most heart-stopping moments of sacrifice you could ever hope to see in a movie like this. If nothing else, it should forever supplant the bedraggled “international coproduction” of 1976, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED, which told close to the same story without anything close to the same panache and subversive spark. As I wrote before, it’s open to debate whether watching movies is any way to remember wars or honor their memorials, but WENT THE DAY WELL? may be one of the more weirdly apt films you could watch on such a day, one which is, appropriately, stirring and unsettling at the same time.