“Do not underestimate the British” is the message of Went the Day Well?, a tea-and-crumpets piece of wartime propaganda from Ealing Studios. It begins with a unit of Germans – disguised as British Tommies – arriving in the village of Bramley End and ends with the villagers uniting to give Fritz a bloody nose. Actually, much more than a bloody nose. The violence, when it eventually comes, is all the more shocking for being out of the blue.
If I tell you that the village where it was shot, Turville in Buckinghamshire, was later used as the location for cosy comedy The Vicar of Dibley and cosy crime series Midsomer Murders that’ll give you an idea of the overall tone. Sleepy, gentle, a cricket match probably about to be played, postmasters and vicars, the chink of cup and saucer in the tea room and milk delivered to your door.
Previously, director Alberto Cavalcanti had worked with John Grierson at the GPO Film Unit, which produced stirring documentaries with a gritty and realistic edge. He’s in the same mode here, directing at pace, yet working up a strong sense of place. He spends a good amount of time introducing the Germans – a polite, civil troop who arrive in Bramley End and announce themselves to the local policeman and the vicar, before trying to organise billets for all their men, all the while posing as Brits.
What the villagers don’t know is that the Germans are part of an advance force who have been sent to disrupt communications so a full-scale invasion can take place. What they also don’t know is that their local squire, Wilsford (Leslie Banks), also the head of the Home Guard, is in cahoots with the Germans (Ealing always enjoying a bit of disruptive class politics in its films). But what Wilsford and the Germans don’t appreciate, for different reasons – Wilsford because he’s the wrong class and the Germans because they’re the wrong nationality – is that Brits with their backs to the wall are a force to be reckoned with.
The Germans’ true colours are eventually revealed, and once they’ve broken cover it’s very much the sneering Nazi versus the plucky Brit. Whether it’s a shop assistant, a telephone switchboard operator, a gang of mischievous kids or a poacher, everyone launches their own mini-campaign to fight the power.
Because Cavalcanti has set everything up so well – country church, windmill on the hill, rolling English countryside – the sudden bursts of action come as a shock. There are a few deaths and they really hit home. One – a group of Home Guard boys cycling home from some playacting manoeuvre unaware they are rolling towards their doom. Another – in the church.
It’s all a touch rose-tinted all the same. Was there really that much sugar available, what with it being rationed? And the image it paints of British society, still deferential (the squire) yet somehow also egalitarian is paradoxical, quixotic or just plain misleading. But Cavalcanti is partly flattering because it suits the propaganda agenda and partly to develop a dramatic counterpoint. At one point he literally cuts from tea and cakes to someone getting an axe in the head.
Overall, though, it’s a case of decent Brits and hissable Germans. Graham Greene came up with the original story, The Lieutenant Died Last, and Jack Higgins would repurpose the idea decades later in The Eagle Has Landed.
A very satisfying film and particularly well worth seeking out in its restored form, which came courtesy of the British Film Institute and also helped restore some of the film’s faded reputation – “undeservedly forgotten” said the New York Times in a 2011 review. Agreed.
Went the Day Well? – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
