+ intro by James Bell, Senior Curator, BFI National Archive
‘The critics, led by Miss Lejeune, literally pulled us to pieces,’ Cavalcanti wrote in his note for the Irish Film Society screening. In fact, the reviews were by no means all bad, and Went the Day Well? had a respectable run at the London Pavilion. But filmmakers will always remember the reviews that hurt most, and Caroline Lejeune savaged the film as though she had simply lost her temper with it. She found the action risible, and in her synopsis easily enough managed to make it sound so. ‘Any display of hate, except in the hands of an expert director and artist, is to be avoided,’ she wrote, ‘since high passions without high performance are less likely to lead to conviction than laughter. The nearer a plot sticks to life at this tense moment of our fortunes, the nearer it gets to drama.’ And the boot went in decisively with her final sentence: ‘The most patriotic film can lose nothing by the exercise of a little talent and taste.’
Of the two ‘Sunday ladies’, C.A. Lejeune in The Observer would then have carried heavier guns than the relative novice Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times. Where The Observer spat, The Sunday Times quietly praised: ‘For once the English people are shown as capable of individual and concerted resourcefulness in a fight and not merely steady in disaster. The essential virtue of the film is its expression of an English tradition: the tradition of the rural community, self-contained, still drawing strength from the past, still adding its own experience to the common store of village history. At last, it seems, we are learning to make films with our own native material.’
Perhaps the most perceptively sympathetic review came from a critic often underrated, now perhaps largely forgotten: William Whitebait (George Stonier) in the New Statesman. He got the mood exactly right: ‘a mixture of friendly human nature and waking nightmare’. ‘It is the sort of film that, after three years of war, with little show and no great expenditure of money, we can make better than anyone. It understates its message, it is beautifully but not too beautifully done, it bridges the gap between actors and human beings.’ But Whitebait also noted that the film had missed its moment, that ‘the temperature is high for invading but low for being invaded’, that audiences were in a mood to take calmly events which a year or so earlier they might have found desperately tense. ‘Cavalcanti has opened our eyes to reality, even if we may feel that this particular reality is past.’
In the end, Went the Day Well? remains what it probably always was, the wild card, the joker in the British wartime cinema pack. Increasingly, as the war progressed, films were to become a celebration of duty, and of the comradeship and discipline needed to carry it out. Their heroes were the crews of the San Demetrio and the Torrin (In Which We Serve), the army unit of The Way Ahead, the fighter squadrons and the bomber crews. In Went the Day Well? it could be said that recognised duty dies with the vicar, and his doomed efforts to carry out his responsibility to God, by defending his church against the barbarians, and to country, by ringing the warning bell. (Ironically, one of the Home Guard does actually hear the bell, but they disregard it, on this sleepy Sunday morning, because it would signify the real thing and they know that theirs is only a training exercise.)
After that, it is every man for himself; and just as much, and most unusually for an Ealing war film, every woman for herself. There are no rules, no clearly defined duties and no reassuring orders to be followed, as frightened old women and flighty young ones spur themselves to improvised action – desperate, hopeful, even absurd. The villagers have no choice but to discover a brutality in themselves, which some do more readily than others. Team action begins to develop, though slowly, as they confront the question of what to do after they have overpowered the guards at the church. The women want to rush to their children, the men immediately to alert the Home Guard. Democratically, they agree to do both.
The contrast between the setting – gentle, peaceful and on the whole virtuous – and the brutish action is ever present, though left unemphasised. (Major Ortler leaning against the 1914-18 War Memorial while planning his village campaign is the sort of discreet gesture the film allows itself.) But the movie itself is not kindly, gentle or particularly squeamish. It finds its own sustaining virtue in a kind of tough good humour. And, as with so many of the Ealing pictures, it has a sturdy particularity: we are not being invited to look for allegories, to regard Bramley End as a microcosm of England under attack. The village is sufficient to itself: complacent, locked into centuries of peace, quite ready to return to its slumbers as soon as the nightmare is over.
The main criticism at the time was that the film was full of implausible behaviour, mainly by the Germans. By which was meant, I suspect, that the switch between the notion of Germans playing at being British soldiers and unmistakably British actors playing at being German soldiers was not the easiest to carry off persuasively. This, rather than such evident improbabilities as that an officer setting out in command of a secret mission would be allowed to take his sweet ration with him. If Cavalcanti had wanted to achieve effects of realism and authenticity at all levels of the film, then he should probably have taken an altogether stricter line with the script, pruning it back towards documentary roots, shading it more darkly.
Perhaps the surrealist side of Cavalcanti was easily able to enjoy such contrasts, to argue that life – or at least life in wartime – may well be like that, even if most sensible movies know better. Or perhaps, as on the whole I think more probable, he simply went ahead and made the film, with all its evident inconsistencies. And, paradoxically, it is just these incongruities and inconsistencies which seem, in the long run, to work to the film’s advantage.
Went the Day Well? is not the grim, strenuously ‘realistic’ study of a village under occupation which might have won more immediate approval from the critics. It is something altogether odder and more untidy: cheerfulness keeps breaking in. The story deals in betrayal, disillusionment, desperate extremes, but the resilience of tone makes it appear that such things are no more than aberrations, disagreeable but not permanently damaging. If Britain had in fact been close to invasion in 1942, Went the Day Well? might have looked like a warning against the sort of mentality that would hear the church bell but decide it could safely be ignored. But already by spring 1942, whatever policy the Ministry of Information was still arguing about for its leaflets, the film was dealing with history which hadn’t happened and was not going to happen. The realities of war had moved on, and Ealing went on to produce Nine Men and San Demetrio, London. Unlike these and many of the other war films, with their firmer basis in fact, Went the Day Well? had a kind of freedom to make itself up as it went along, rather as Bramley End has to take its fate into its own hands. Even the film’s structure sets it out for what it is: imagined history posing as real history, but also aware that the pretence takes in no one.
Penelope Houston, Went the Day Well? (BFI Publishing, 1992)
WENT THE DAY WELL?
Directed by: [Alberto] Cavalcanti
Presented by: Ealing Studios
Distributed by: Associated British Film Distributors
Produced by: Michael Balcon
Associate Producer: S.C. Balcon
Production Manager: Hal Mason
Production Supervisor: John Croydon
Story and Screen Play: John Dighton, Diana Morgan, Angus MacPhail
From a story by: Graham Greene
Cameraman: Wilkie Cooper
Reporter Cameraman: D. [Douglas] Slocombe
Camera Operator: G. [Gerald] Gibbs
Special Effects: Roy Kellino
Editor: Sidney Cole
Art Director: Tom Morahan
Music: William Walton
Musical Director: Ernest Irving
Sound Supervisor: Eric Williams
Sound Recordist: L. Page
Sound System: RCA
Thanked in credits: The War Office
Made and Recorded at: Ealing Studios
uncredited
Location Manager: Ronald Brantford
Assistant Directors: Billy Russell, Muriel Cole, Norman Priggen, Cyril Pope
Continuity: Daphne Heathcote
Assistant Camera: Hal Britten, J. Dean, Desmond Crowley
Stills: Wilfrid Newton, Eddie Orton
Assistant Art Director: Michael Relph
Sound Camera: Peter T. Davies
Boom Operator: Bert Minnell
Cast
Leslie Banks (Oliver Wilsford)
Elizabeth Allan (Peggy Fry)
Frank Lawton (Tom Sturry)
Basil Sydney (Major Ortler)
Valerie Taylor (Nora Ashton)
Mervyn Johns (Charlie Sims)
Edward Rigby (Bill Purvis, the poacher)
Marie Lohr (Mrs Fraser)
C.V. France (Vicar Ashton)
David Farrar (Lt Jung)
Muriel George (Mrs Collins, the postmistress)
Thora Hird (Ivy, land girl)
Norman Pierce (Jim Sturry)
men of the Gloucestershire Regiment (soldiers)
Harry Fowler (young George Truscott)
Patricia Hayes (Daisy)
Hilda Bayley (cousin Maud Chapman)
Johnny Schofield (Joe Garbett)
Ellis Irving (Harry Drew)
Philippa Hiatt (Mrs Bates)
Grace Arnold (Mrs Owen)
John Slater (German sergeant)
Eric Micklewood (soldier Klotz)
uncredited
Josephine Middleton (Mrs Carter)
James Donald (German corporal)
Gerard Heinz (Schmidt)
Gerald Moore (Johnnie Wade)
Robert MacDermot (BBC announcer)
Charles Paton (Harry Brown)
Arthur Ridley (Father Owen)
Anthony Pilbeam (Ted Garbett)
Lilian Ellias (Bridget, the Frasers’ maid)
Kathleen Boutall (Mrs Sturry)
Mavis Villiers (Violet)
Josie Welford (June)
Norman Shelley (Bob Owen)
Irene Arnold (Mrs Drew)
Leslie Gorman, Robert Bradford, Dean Braine, Wyndham Milligan, H. Victor Weske (German soldiers)
UK 1942
95 mins
35mm Nitrate
A BFI National Archive print
MARTIN SCORSESE SELECTS HIDDEN GEMS OF BRITISH CINEMA
Shooting Stars
Sun 1 Sep 11:30; Mon 9 Sep 20:40
Brief Ecstasy
Tue 3 Sep 18:30; Wed 11 Sep 20:35
The Man in Grey
Fri 6 Sep 18:10; Tue 17 Sep 20:40
This Happy Breed
Fri 6 Sep 20:40; Tue 24 Sep 18:00
The Seventh Veil
Sat 7 Sep 15:10; Wed 25 Sep 20:40
Green for Danger
Sun 8 Sep 15:40; Thu 26 Sep 20:55
It Always Rains on Sunday
Sun 8 Sep 18:10; Fri 27 Sep 20:50
Hue and Cry
Sat 14 Sep 20:30; Mon 30 Sep 18:15 (+ intro by Josephine Botting, Curator, BFI National Archive)
Uncle Silas
Sat 14 Sep 18:20
Terence Fisher Double Bill: To the Public Danger + Stolen Face
Sun 15 Sep 18:10; Tue 1 Oct 20:30
Mandy
Mon 16 Sep 18:35; Sat 28 Sep 12:20
Yield to the Night
Fri 20 Sep 18:00; Sat 28 Sep 15:10
The Flesh and the Fiends
Sat 21 Sep 14:50; Wed 2 Oct 20:40
The Damned
Sat 21 Sep 20:40; Fri 4 Oct 18:30
Station Six Sahara
Sun 22 Sep 12:30; Sat 5 Oct 16:00
The Mind Benders
Sun 22 Sep 18:00; Wed 2 Oct 18:20
Went the Day Well? + intro by James Bell, Senior Curator, BFI National Archive
Mon 23 Sep 18:20
The Pumpkin Eater
Fri 27 Sep 18:00; Sun 6 Oct 15:00
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde
Sat 28 Sep 18:10; Thu 3 Oct 18:15 + intro by Sam Clemens, son of Brian Clemens
The Legend of Hell House
Sat 28 Sep 20:40; Mon 7 Oct 18:20
Guns at Batasi
Sun 29 Sep 18:20; Sat 5 Oct 18:20
With thanks to
Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright
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