Fledgling filmmaker (and future film historian) Kevin Brownlow worked in collaboration with Andrew Mollo for nearly ten years to create
It Happened Here
. Shot on 16-millimeter stock in stark quasi-documentary fashion, the film is predicated on the postulation that Germany had invaded--and defeated--England in World War II. Brownlow and Mollo's vision of this nightmarish world is perfect in every detail, right down to the German road signs in rural Britain. The plotline is carried by Pauline Murray, playing a nurse who uncovers Nazi atrocities perpetrated on Polish and Russian hospital patients. Begun in 1957 when Brownlow was an 18-year-old editing apprentice,
was finally completed in 1964, and released theatrically two years later.