Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-minute interview with Brownlow, in which he recounts how he set out in 1956, at the age of 18, to make this ambitious “alternative history” of England living under wartime Nazi collaboration.

The development of the film – the 17-year-old Mollo came on board the following year as co-director after Brownlow sought his advice on war-time costuming and design, only to be told squarely that his solo efforts to that point weren’t up to much – is a tale in itself. Working with amateurs and filming at weekends, they took eight years to reach the final version that played at the 1964 London Film Festival.

Crew included future talents such as Peter Suschitzky in his first major cinematographer role, alongside Peter Watkins as an assistant director. Filming started on 16 mm, before backing from Tony Richardson at Woodfall Films enabled a move up to 35 mm “short ends” (film stock unused at the end of a reel) that came partly from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. It made for an economy of both process and style, one that in no way reflected in the scale of the final film, however.

There was nothing amateur about the film’s central idea either, with its premise that the Germans had invaded England following the British retreat from Dunkirk, driving resistance underground; by 1944, however, the partisans were beginning to resurface, supported by invading American troops, as seen in the film’s final scenes, which are as unflinching a portrayal of the reality of resistance movements as you will find. The Nazi-supporting “Immediate Action” (IA) movement rapidly stepped up to run a British administration that proved very ready to collaborate.

It Happened Here more than stands comparison with last year’s TV adaptation of Len Deighton’s SS-GB, bringing home how the limited resources of the film worked in its favour, its laconism most of all foregrounding psychology. Heroine Pauline is evacuated from partisan territory back to bomb-ravaged London, along whose streets the Nazis strut (pictured above left). Despite trying to escape involvement in anything political, she joins the IA as a nurse, her decision driven by a typical “try to get back to normal” mentality (the non-professional Pauline Murray’s clipped delivery is very much in Brief Encounter spirit). In her exposure to the realities of life within the system – from the blimpish, rabble-rousing speeches to how it treats the weak – as well as by witnessing the fate of some erstwhile friends who had chosen a different direction, Pauline is forced to confront the consequence of her choices, becoming something of an Everyman character in the process.

It looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the period authenticity isn’t something usually associated with that style)

Brownlow and Mollo establish the historical context of the time, as well as the meaning of National Socialism, with a brilliant faux German newsreel “Mirror on the World” which dates the new Anglo-German cooperation back to the famous Christmas truce of WWI. It’s so much more than pastiche (the full 10-minute version comes as another extra here), catching atmosphere outstandingly: like the periodic radio broadcasts through the film, voice work was done by the same BBC announcers and commentators who had worked through the war.        

But it’s the scene that follows the newsreel that really unsettles, as some of Pauline’s IA colleagues articulate the essence of their Nazi ideas, ranging from attitudes to the Jews and the “slime of Communism” to eugenics (main picture). The directors had been associating with some of the British Far Right as part of their research, and here they simply sat some of them down and allowed them to express their beliefs in practically documentary style.

It proved too much for distributor United Artists, however: despite critical controversy, It Happened Here was released in May 1966 with that crucial scene cut. It’s restored here, of course, and Brownlow’s commentary gives the full story behind that. It wasn’t the directors' only disappointment: they never saw “a brass farthing” back from release, despite a degree of box-office success (made on a budget of around £7,000 in the money of the time, it took more than three times that sum in the UK alone). Branded “uncommercial”, they took another decade to make their second film, the English Civil War drama Winstanley.

Brownlow has since had an illustrious concurrent career as a film historian, whose work with silent film, including the full restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoléon, speaks for itself. This new 2K remaster from original camera negative marks his 80th birthday, and It Happened Here looks now like a piece of guerrilla filmmaking ahead of its time (though the remarkable period authenticity that was so crucial for Mollo isn’t something usually associated with that style). But the relevance of its commentary on human nature and society living through times of national upheaval has never gone away. Chilling.

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Overleaf: watch the original trailer for It Happened Here

Not far into Aftermath, Tate Britain’s new exhibition looking at how the experience of World War One shaped artists working in its wake, hangs a group of photographs by Pierre Anthony-Thouret depicting the damage inflicted on Reims.

The show’s subtitle – “Songs banned by the Nazis” – is a catchy one, and somewhere under the confetti, the stilettos, the extravagant nudity, the sequins and even shinier repartee that are wrapped around Effigies of Wickedness like a mink coat on the shoulders of an SS officer’s mistress is the bruised and grubby story of one of history’s foulest episodes.

Towards the end of the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg's Life and Fate, a long scene in director Lev Dodin's daring if necessarily selective adaptation of Vasily Grossman's epic novel brings many of the actors together after a sequence of painful monologues and one-to-ones.

Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness”. Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play.

There are too many awestruck cultural histories of Paris to even begin to count. The Anglophone world has always been justly dazzled by its own cohorts of Paris-based writers and artists, as well as by the seemingly effortless superiority of French intellectual life.

Monologues are very much the flavour of the start of this theatrical year. At the Royal Court, we have Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s brilliant Girls & Boys, coming hot on the tottering heels of Anoushka Warden’s My Mum’s a Twat, while at the Bush a season of solo plays is currently disturbing psyches with Monica Dolan’s B*easts.

It’s fascinating to compare this Norwegian film, which despite being Oscar-nominated (it made the Best Foreign Film shortlist of nine, but not the final five) has slipped out without a cinema release in the UK, with Darkest Hour. Set over a crucial few days in April 1940, it’s a parallel story of powerful personalities and their personal and political dilemmas in the face of Germany’s invasion of Europe. But the parallels don’t extend to directorial style; where Joe Wright opted for overly artful set pieces and CGI flourishes in Darkest Hour, for The King’s Choice Erik Poppe adheres to the Dogme school of handheld camera and minimal artifice, save for a few visual effects.

The film opens with a classic montage of newsreel archive giving the backstory. Danish prince Carl accepted the Norwegian throne in 1905 when Norway declared independence from Sweden. We see the celebrations as Carl is crowned King Haakon VII. Grainy black and white footage of the glamorous royals, graciously playing their roles as figureheads over the decades, is abruptly superseded by the Germans torpedoing ships in Norwegian waters in April 1940. Norway’s neutrality means nothing to the Nazis; Germany wants its coast for strategic purposes and the country’s interior for its iron mines. Invasion is inevitable and the king is faced with a choice – surrender or fight the Nazi war-machine with wholly inadequate Norwegian forces.Poppe dramatises the next three days in painstaking detail. We cut between the royal family fleeing the city (pictured above: Haakon and the crown prince strafed by Nazi bombers), the baby-faced soldiers who are trying to defend them in the countryside, and the Nazi envoy to Norway, Kurt Braüer (Karl Markovics), who is trying to mediate with Berlin. The infamous Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who became a puppet leader under the Nazis, is heard spouting insidious commands on the radio, but never seen.

There are some great performances in the film – particularly by Danish veteran Jesper Christensen as King Haakon – and some powerful dramatic scenes that really capture the fear and tension of that time. Filmed in snowy landscapes or on deserted city streets, the muted colours and interiors are quite beautiful. Adhering to Dogme rules, there is a very minimal but effective music score and sound effects. It’s a refreshingly restrained war movie which focuses on the royal family, moral dilemmas and local characters.

But it’s a long watch and not without its clichés – as young women in beautiful cardigan-and-blouse combinations look anxiously at the uniformed men around them barking orders, it’s almost impossible not to have the Downfall bunker parodies come to mind. And while the story of Haakon’s brave stand against inevitable invasion is a cornerstone of modern Norway’s sense of itself as a nation, it’s possibly not of huge interest outside the country. This DVD release comes with unimpressive extras – film of the premiere in Oslo with reactions from pensioners, and a fragment detailing the effects used to create the navy explosions.  

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@saskiabaron

Overleaf: watch the Edinburgh Film Festival trailer for The King's Choice

Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the Third Reich had stuck to a non-aggression pact with Britain and expanded unopposed into the lebensraum of the Soviet Union.

When director Bruce Guthrie first gave me the script for Man to Man by Manfred Karge, I was immediately mesmerised by the language, each of the 27 scenes leapt off the page. Some are a few short sentences, other pages long; every one a perfectly formed fragment from a unique and potentially broken mind, flipping from prose to poetry. There are no stage directions, no character description.