It Happened Here (Brownlow/Mollo, 1964): Close-Up Cinema, 6pm
This screening is followed by Kevin Brownlow's 1975 feature Winstanley at 8.30pm. Followed by a live conversation between Brownlow and Stanley Schtinter.Chicago Reader review:
This speculative 1965 drama by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo
exemplifies English independent filmmaking at its most resourceful and
intransigent. Paralleling Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,
which imagined what North America might have become had Hitler won, the
film portrays what England might have been like in 1944 had it been
invaded and occupied by Germany four years earlier. Fanatically
dedicated to period detail and refusing to fall back on stock footage,
Brownlow started the film in 1956, at age 18, some time before enlisting
military scholar Mollo as a full collaborator and a full decade before
the film was finally released. Their decision to use real English
fascists and proto-Nazis to express the views of their 1944 counterparts
on Jews and euthanasia led to the film’s most interesting sequence
being suppressed in the 60s, and it took Brownlow over 30 years to
regain the rights to the film so he could restore it. As narrative it
can be dry and unemphatic (most of the actors are nonprofessionals), but
as speculation it’s highly convincing and endlessly fascinating. The
beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by Peter Suschitzky, who
went on to work for John Boorman, Ken Russell, George Lucas, Tim Burton,
and David Cronenberg.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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