It Happened Here

The film asks a question: what if Germany had occupied Britain in 1940? Pauline is a nurse caught in the middle of the war. She has to work somewhere and joins the occupation administration's medical service. Her aim is not politics but staying alive. But the place she works is part of a system, and that system is doing something that grows steadily clearer. Pauline has to decide when she is going to see it. The story of how the film was made is a separate thing in itself. Kevin Brownlow had the idea at eighteen and started shooting it with Andrew Mollo, who was sixteen; the film took eight years to finish. There was no money, the cast was mostly amateur, and the scenes were shot like documentary. United Artists eventually took the distribution. The film caused argument when it was shown because it presents collaboration not as monstrousness but as an ordinary reflex of survival. That is what is disturbing about it.