One of cinema’s most alarming alternative histories, It Happened Here (1964) considers a version of events after the Second World War, following a British retreat from the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940.
England is under Nazi occupation and governed by British ‘blackshirt’ fascists, who work against partisan activity. SS officers line the streets of Westminster and lead military parades across Regents Park. Portraits of Oswald Mosley and Adolf Hitler are proudly displayed in Whitehall, while soldiers pose happily for photographs around the Albert Memorial and St Paul’s.
Set between 1944 and 1945, the plot focuses on Irish district nurse Pauline (Pauline Murray), who tries to follow ‘law and order’ after her swift evacuation to London from the south-west of England. Surviving execution, Pauline decides to join the Immediate Action Organisation as an emergency medical technician, but slowly begins to realise the depth of brutality and duplicity in Hitler’s England.
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