Went the Day Well? (1942 Cavalcanti)

Gripping, shocking film displays casual disregard for life from the moment the vicar is shot dead in his own church, and must have hit the British public hard. Mervyn Johns opens by telling us that the story didn't come out until after the war and Hitler was defeated - a brave stance indeed.

Undercover Germans (led by Basil Sydney, David Farrar and John Slater) take over village (actually Turville, in one of its long line of movie appearances - even the windmill from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is in it). A most useful cast of not terribly well known actors is gradually decimated. Leslie Banks, Valerie Taylor, Marie Lohr (who, as the plucky lady of the manor, is the last to expire saving the children from a hand grenade in a wonderfully understated moment), Harry Fowler, Frank Lawton, Norman Pierce, Elizabeth Allan, Thora Hird, Muriel George, Patricia Hayes. When reliable old poacher Edward Rigby is killed, then plucky boy Harry Fowler (Hue and Cry) is shot, we realise all the usual rules have been abandoned.

Wilkie Cooper filmed it, with a D. Slocombe assisting. The story was from Graham Greene ('The Lieutenant Died Last'), and ingeniously the various tricks and escape plans the villagers come up with all misfire, through the writing of John Dighton, Diana Morgan and Angus MacPhail. William Walton wrote the music, though in key sequences, there isn't any.

You'd think it must have been quite shocking for the audience of the time. But George Perry in 'Forever Ealing' says:

".. it seems the reaction in its own time was more blasé. 'The scripting is indifferent, banal at times, and the direction lacks cohesion,' said the Monthly Film Bulletin. 'Artificial... trite melodrama' said Picturegoer.'

It's sensational.