Produced in the spring of 1942, this was Cavalcanti’s first Ealing feature as a director: a film that still unsettles, even shocks, through its treatment of English life and traditions and the spectacle of a cosy English village under attack. Fears of an English invasion had been vigorously stirred by the Government, often with good reason, though Cavalcanti undertook this tale, based on a short story by Graham Greene, in a half-playful spirit of fantasy. Disguised as British soldiers, with German accents rigorously suppressed, the Germans insinuate themselves into the pretty village of Bramley End – a place stocked by British character actors and actresses so familiar at the time that they must have felt like members of the audience’s families. Cavalcanti plays upon this very familiarity, pulling the ground from under us by putting these well-loved faces in extreme danger, and showing them turning to sudden violence to defend their green and pleasant land. The violence is generally presented through abrupt editing and tightly-angled compositions – European infusions far removed from the procession of sedate shots typical of the British mainstream. Critics’ reactions were violently mixed; it’s taken time for observers to look beyond the surface action and fully appreciate this film of subversive realism, surrealism almost – as quizzical about British life and as full of ambiguities as anything by Powell and Pressburger. The title is derived from an anonymous poem, popular at the time: “Went the day well? We died, and never knew. But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you.”

Geoff Brown