WITCHFINDER GENERAL

-

Judging by this film, seventeenth-century England was a rough time to be a woman.

Take young Sarah for example.

She lives with her uncle, a priest, and is happily betrothed to Richard, a handsome and dashing Roundhead soldier (yes, we're in the Civil War).  When he pops by on leave, and hears that she and her uncle are concerned that they might be the target of local lawlessness he promises he will protect her.

Great!  Except he then has to re-join his regiment, and isn't at all concerned when on his way out of the village he meets Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price sporting an evil haircut) coming the other way.

Hopkins is going from place to place torturing interrogating suspected witches before executing them, and receiving payment from the local magistrate into the bargain.  And he has no problem with any of his victims offering their bodies to him in the vain hope of being let off.

Sure enough he sets his sights on Sarah's uncle (witches are not exclusively female it turns out) and poor Sarah has to pretend to be a servant girl and sleep with Hopkins in order to try to save her uncle. It's all to no avail - her uncle is hanged and Hopkins tootles off, but not before Sarah is raped by Hopkins's second-in-command, the brutish Stearne.

When Richard returns and hears all this he vows revenge on Hopkins and Stearne.  But again, alas, he is obliged to return to the Roundhead army, so packs Sarah off to safety in a nearby village.

Well, of course Hopkins turns up there, leading to a climax in which Richard and Sarah are both accused of witchcraft, and so face the prospect of torture and then execution.  Sarah's first up, and suffers needles being jabbed into her back.  You might expect Richard to confess to witchcraft to save her further agony, but no he just keeps on vowing revenge.

Quite how much more torture Sarah might have suffered whilst Richard nobly resists the temptation to confess we never find out because fortunately a couple of Richard's men arrive to save the day.

Hopkins and Stearne are both killed, and Richard is very, very angry that he can't inflict any injury on the former.  

No one seems in any rush to untie Sarah, and I for one don't blame her for totally losing it at this stage, and the film ends with her screaming uncontrollably.

Twenty-four year old director and co-writer Michael Reeves serves up a creepy and atmospheric slice of horror here, managing to extract a halfway decent performance from Price, who for once is not hamming it up.

Clearly Reeves had talent to burn but tragically he died from an accidental overdose a few months after this film was released.

RATING: ✓ Cheers

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WHERE EAGLES DARE

-
Rather embarrassingly I sometimes confuse this film with ‘The Eagle Has Landed’. Admittedly they are both classic WW2 adventures with similar titles - but even so. This film is described by Wikipedia as an ‘’action adventure war thriller spy film" which hints at why it is so beloved - over its 155 minutes it manages to span three or four popular genres. Which is not to say it needs all that runtime - it would be easy to cut 20 minutes or so.  For example, the sequences after  the moment when the chief goal of the mission has been accomplished could surely be trimmed. It is a measure of Richard Burton’s star power in the mid-1960s that all he needed to do was express a wish to be the lead in an action film (for Elizabeth Taylor’s children to enjoy) and hey presto a film studio makes it happen. I had assumed that this film was an adaptation of an existing Alistair Maclean novel but in fact he wrote the screenplay to order, in just six weeks (he then converted it to a novel). Giv...
Read more

UNION PACIFIC

-
Image
To call this a Western would be to give scant justice to its epic scale, but then what else would you expect from a film directed by Cecil B. DeMille?  It has a running time of 135 minutes, extras fill the screen at every opportunity (such as the saloon scenes) and there are two spectacular trainwrecks along with all the other drama.  Considering it is ostensibly a celebration of the completion of a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans it is a surprisingly entertaining film.   It is established early on in the story that a tycoon who pretends to be backing the Union Pacific Railroad secretly wants to sabotage the building of the track in order to make a huge financial killing (the details of which can safely be ignored).  To this end he employs shady gambler and saloon owner, Sid Campeau (Brian Donleavy), to use gambling, booze and women to cause trouble among the labourers. Given the success of Campeau's efforts, the railroad company recruits Captai...
Read more

WICKED

-
As someone who is suspicious of any film musical since 1979's ‘All That Jazz’ (a kind of high water mark), and as one who doesn’t feel that every villain needs a backstory, I approached this film with some trepidation, especially since  turning a stage musical into two lengthy films seemed self indulgent. Despite all of these concerns however, I enjoyed the ride.  It didn’t drag, it has some decent songs (and one very good one), and it wasn't as CGI-heavy as it might have been. It also sprung a few surprises. For example, it's very woke.  Not content with a main character, Elphaba, who is discriminated against solely because of the colour of her skin, the story gives her a sister in a wheelchair, as well as (another surprise) talking animals who are being persecuted. Their oppressor is of course the Wizard of Oz himself, but trying to explain to any young children watching this film why he is being so beastly to the cuddly animals might be challenging.   ...
Read more