KATHY SHAIDLE ON IT HAPPENED HERE:

Note too that Brownlow and Mollo called their film It Happened Here; even raving leftist Sinclair Lewis was still American enough to stick an admittedly sarcastic “Can’t” in the title of his fictional anti-fascist fantasia.

(As Tom Wolfe quipped, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States — and yet lands only in Europe.”)

I also wonder if you could get almost 1,000 unpaid actors and extras in the United States circa 1945 to enthusiastically either put on Nazi uniforms and parade down a New York City street — one thinks of Rick’s retort to Major Strasser’s pointed question about his hometown in Casablanca — or remain in civilian clothes and cheer them on, as seen throughout It Happened Here. 

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But It Happened Here is still a highly watchable curio, and an astonishing accomplishment for two young men barely out of their teens. (Brownlow grew up to become a beloved expert on, and preservationist of, silent films, and Mollo is the man Hollywood calls in to consult on period military uniforms. His late brother John won an Oscar for his Star Wars costumes. Speaking of which, the cinematographer, Peter Suschitzky, went on to shoot The Empire Strikes Back — and The Rocky Horror Picture Show — among others.)

I saw It Happened Here at the Film Forum in New York about 15 years or so ago, and it really is a wonder the film got made at all. But on a shoestring budget, the pair of novice directors explored some of the same territory that Fatherland and Man in the High Castle would mine decades later. Read the whole thing.