Writer-director Eric Steele made the impressive small-scale vampire movie Boy #5. Here, again with minimal (but professional) resources, he ambitiously tackles the ‘Nazis won the War’ theme with some doctored and staged news footage from the GBBC propaganda outfit to sketch in the scenario … here, Germany unleashed a bioweapon before the Battle of Britain and were able to occupy and take over the UK because they have a monopoly on the vaccine which keeps the ‘todesgrippe’ at bay. President Wilkie is keeping the US neutral and opening trade negotiations with the Greater German Reich. Stalin has just signed another five-year non-aggression pact with Hitler. Edward VIII is back on the throne and Oswald Mosley is PM. No one talks about what happened to Mr Churchill or the former King or, say, India.
In 1942, German soldiers – and one locally-recruited Kripo (Joseph Jordan), a nasty little git getting off on being in with the winners and getting back at everyone who looked at him wrong – go down a street, hauling out all the residents for interrogation, on the principle that someone must have connections with ‘the Resistance’. To prove they mean business, the Nazis summarily execute people they know have no useful information to pressue the rest to talk. For most of the film, these seemingly-random folk – from all classes and political persuasions – are held in an empty church, to be interrogated by SS bastard Goethe (Matthew McCloud). In conversation with Leutnant Otto Binder (Steve Murphy) – presumably named after the pulp/comics writer who co-created Supergirl – Goethe lets slip a secret which could threaten the iron hold of the National Socialists over Britain, which eventually leaks out into the dwindling pool of prisoners and poses yet another what-to-do quandary.
Mostly in stark black and white, this evokes Went the Day Well? and It Happened Here in imagining Nazis in Britain but also stirs in many contemporary issues, from divisive responses to the pandemic to the rise of a home-grown nasty far right. It’s not free from low-budget woes, especially when it comes to action, and some of the German accents hark back to commando comics – though if one thing has come out of recent events it’s that it’s impossible to overestimate the way Nazis lean into their own caricatures. Squirming in the pews or the interrogation room are a range of not-entirely admirable Brits who mostly just want to muddle through – a floppy-haired student (Matas Kidelis) who’s flipped from communism to fascism, a slightly bent tax man (Nick Stefan Brown) and his genteelly superior wife (Laura Montgomery), a cynical ex-soldier (Oliver Devoti), a secretly Jewish academic (Adrian Palmer), a young hothead (Johnny Vernon), a midwife (Mia Vore).
Much of the film works like a play, with all these people forced together and forced to take (or try to avoid taking) stands – some arguing (even persuasively) for selfishness, others desperately hoping that some form of communal action will get them out of here with their fingernails unpulled. The underlying message of most Nazis-won-the-war stories, except those written by actual Nazi sympathisers, is the slogan of Brecht’s Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui ‘Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again’ Steele here returns to this form of fiction in an age when there’s a whole litter of bastard puppies out there – and making films like this has become an urgent necessity.
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