Went the Day Well?

Soldiers arrive in an English village saying they are Royal Engineers. The villagers put them up. They are German paratroopers, and their task is to disable the radar in the area and open the way for a landing. By the time the village understands, the phone lines are cut and there is no way out. Alberto Cavalcanti directs for Ealing. The source is Graham Greene's story The Lieutenant Died Last. It was made in 1942, in the middle of the war, and designed as a warning: the traitor inside the village is its most respected man. It is one of the plainest British films about the fear of the fifth column. What gets discussed most now is the violence. The people who fight back are not professional soldiers but the village women, the vicar, the postmistress. The scene in which the postmistress blinds a German soldier with pepper and kills him with an axe is far harder than forties British cinema was expected to be. The title comes from a line by John Maxwell Edmonds used on war graves. Who it is for: viewers interested in wartime British cinema and propaganda with real suspense in it. Who it is not for: the tone reads oddly today. It is both a village story and an account of a massacre, and the two do not entirely fit together.