Mr. Godfrey
Practically Family
- Messages
- 632
The new BFI restoration of Cavalcanti's 'Went the Day Well' has just been released for a few showings and I am off to see it at the The Rex Cinema in Berkhamstead. A restored Art Deco cinema. I have seen this film so many times on TV and DVD but I cannot wait to see it on the big screen and at the Rex. Funny really but the village it's filmed in only the road surface has changed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYKf4bJm86w
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.
This film is screening as part of Long Live Film, a major project celebrating the 75th anniversary of the BFI National Archive.
and the cinema
http://www.therexberkhamsted.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYKf4bJm86w
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.
This film is screening as part of Long Live Film, a major project celebrating the 75th anniversary of the BFI National Archive.
and the cinema
http://www.therexberkhamsted.com/
