THE MASTERPIECE
We reassess the greatest films of all time, one film at a time
Father (Arthur Ridley) and Mrs Owen (Grace Arnold) with an unwelcome visitor.
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Went The Day Well?
IN MAY 1942, sometime between the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Stalingrad, a troop of actors and crew members, under the command of a heavily accented Brazilian, gathered in the sleepy Buckinghamshire village of Turville to make a deceptively simple film with a distinctly odd title, drawn from a 1918 epigraph (“Went the day well? We died and never knew. But, well or ill, Freedom, we died for you”) by John Maxwell Edmonds.
Expanded from Graham Greene’s 1940 short story The Lieutenant Dies Last and filmed as ‘They Came In Khaki’, Went The Day Well? (US title: 48 Hours) begins with a fourthwall-breaking introduction by the vicar of ‘Bramley End’. Standing by a churchyard memorial to German soldiers — German soldiers? In Buckinghamshire? In 1942? — he begins to relate a story about a Nazi invasion of his pastoral village, clearly a metaphorical microcosm of England itself. The ensuing tale is told, in anecdotal retrospect, from the point of view of an Allied victory, a boldly optimistic position given the course of the war at that juncture, with the turning points — Midway, El Alamein and Stalingrad — still months away.