Irish Film Institute -WENT THE DAY WELL?

WENT THE DAY WELL?

Director: ALBERTO CAVALCANTI

93 minutes| U.K.| 1942| Black and White| D-Cinema


RE-RELEASE

Brazilian by birth, Alberto Cavalcanti began in films as a French modernist, and then introduced cosmopolitan panache to British documentary and Ealing Studios. His most astonishing film, 1942’s Went the Day Well? is restored and re-released.

‘Cavalcanti’s wartime film, based on a story by Graham Greene, still unsettles, even shocks, with its subversive, almost surreal spectacle of a cosy English village under Nazi attack in the Second World War. Disguised as British soldiers, the invading Germans insinuate themselves into a pretty village inhabited by British character players so familiar to wartime audiences that they must have seemed like family members. Always the mischievous foreign observer, Cavalcanti kicks away their usual charm, letting them kill and be killed in a violent battle for their green, pleasant land. Critics’ reactions at the time were mixed, but now we can properly relish this visionary film, as jolting and quizzical about British life as anything by Powell and Pressburger.’ (Geoff Brown)

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