Text at the beginning of Eric Ian Steele’s ’Forty-Two briefly lays out a familiar history of the Second World War: Germany’s repeated failure to invade and capture Britain, followed by its eventual defeat when America joined the conflict in alliance with Britain. It then boldly posts the question, “But what if it had all happened differently?”.
In other words, despite the chronological specificity of its title, this is an alternative history, speculating about what a hypothetical Axis victory in World War II might have looked like. This is in the same arena as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978) and Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1998) – all novels which have subsequently been adapted into their own TV series (respectively in 2015, 2017 and 1994). In the scenario of ’Forty-Two, Britain has succumbed not to military invasion, but to a chemical weapon: a deadly virus known as die Todesgrippe, released by Germany into the south of England and now endemic, with the entire population now dependent on regular access to a life-saving vaccine which the Nazis alone control – and so the nation has fallen into German hands.
Now the President of the US is not Franklin D. Roosevelt but Republican Wendell Willkie, who has notably softened his own interventionist views and is about to enter a pact with Germany. The Soviets have not left the Axis, and are supporting the Third Reich. Edward VIII has come back to reclaim the British throne, and the Prime Minister is now the fascist Oswald Mosley, with the strong implication that the Nazis have done away with George VI and Winston Churchill. “Großbritannia” is now witness to book burnings, labour camps, mass purges of undesirables and wide-spread SS oppression on its own shores.
All this forms the background of Steele’s film, gleaned from news reels and casual comments – but the focus of ’Forty-Two is a small, disparate ensemble of Mancunians who, in a set-up reminiscent of Lee Hae-young’s Phantom (2023), have been rounded up and taken to a requisitioned church where they are to flush out and finger who amongst them is working for the shadowy resistance. Resistance is key here. For the question that Steele’s screenplay dramatises over and over is just what resistance might mean in a totalitarian regime, where only those in power have rights, and everyone else is at their whim.
SS Obersturmführer Heinrich Goethe (Matthew McCloud), who is overseeing this operation, is fully aware that it is a pantomime, and treats it merely as a means to his own advancement, but that does not stop him torturing and murdering even those whom he knows are blameless – and he does so with a sadism that matches his cynicism. At his side, Lieutenant Otto Binder (Steve Murphy) repeatedly questions the morality of what is unfolding, but still follows orders, insisting that he is a soldier rather than a politician. Private Slater (Joseph Jordan), an otherwise weak and stupid English brute, has relished signing up for the Kripo where he is now licensed to bully and rape as he pleases, and is more loyal to his Nazi employers than to his captive compatriots. Even some of the prisoners, like the middle-class tax inspector Clarence Kennedy (Nick Stefan Brown), are quite content with their lot under the Nazis, while others, like the student Ralph Nightingale (Matas Kidelis), would rather do the occupiers’ bidding than face any kind of trouble.
Others, though, must carefully negotiate their different degrees of defiance. The ex-soldier turned self-serving pacifist Arthur Fletcher (Oliver Devoti), the caring midwife Marilyn Dawson (Mia Vore), the publican William Grant (Allan Nicol), young Tommy Armstrong (Johnny Vernon) and the elderly, secretive Professor Grey (Adrian Palmer) all strongly oppose what has become of their country, and even the tax inspector’s wife Virginia (Laura Montgomery) shows unexpectedly active recalcitrance when push comes to shove. Yet they all know – or at least quickly learn – that in this once holy place, the wrong move, or even just the wrong word, can lead to a vicious beating or much, much worse, that there can be no reasoning or appeals to justice with captors like theirs, and that even the most innocent among them can face arbitrary yet ultimate penalties.
’Forty-Two is presented mostly in monochrome, matching not only the most prevalent film format of the time in which it is set, but also the drab dystopian colourlessness of life under tyranny. Yet as well as offering a dark reverse of Britain in the early Forties, Steele’s film is also very much about our own times. For it taps right into an uncertain era when pandemics spread fear, when vaccines provoke debate about social control, when fascism is on the rise again, when democracy itself is under threat, and when Slater the Kripo seems not at all far removed from those otherwise unemployable thugs who join ICE as an excuse to enact with impunity their racist fantasies of ‘patriotic’ state violence.
This is ultra-low budget, and scrappy around the edges – indeed full of that plucky, make-do spirit of Britain under war and rations – but it is also ambitious in its ideas, and confronting. To watch it is to be faced with the question of what, in this impossible life-or-death situation, you would do, and which side of the Nazi uniform you would be on. Would you lick the boot – or even wear it? Would you complicitly adopt a submissive quietism, hoping beyond hope that you would somehow not be drawn into the orbit of all the ambient atrocity? Would you take up arms, or whatever sharp objects you could find, for a lost cause? Would you fight your own corner, or band together with others? How would you respond under horrific physical torments, administered with a sardonic smile? These are questions that nobody, in an ideal world, should ever have to answer – but in this far from perfect world that we all inhabit, they are becoming ever more urgent and unavoidable, making Steele’s alternative-universe allegory a necessary rehearsal.
strap: Eric Ian Steele’s timely alternative-history World War II drama confronts us with the question of whether and how we would resist fascism
© Anton Bitel
