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Post by wmcclain on Apr 13, 2020 18:27:15 GMT
Witchfinder General (1968), directed by Michael Reeves. Aka Conqueror Worm. Life is pretty good for a self-appointed witchfinder during the English Civil War. He finds witches wherever he needs them and gets paid per head and can extort sex from comely maidens. What could go wrong? Maybe messing with the bride-to-be of a stalwart soldier who isn't putting up with this nonsense. Controversial at the time for sadism and exploitative violence, it was censored in the UK but ran uncut in the US. We see much worse today, but this violence is meant to be realistic, repellent and genuinely disturbing. Our heroes are driven mad both by what they experience, and their frenzy for revenge. I remember being a bit nauseated by some of this when I was young, but older and more calloused now, it does not seem so unsettling. Ian Ogilvy and Hilary Heath are fine as our lovers, young but with a maturity hard to find these days. Unusual for 1968, we have a lyrical erotic love scene. Heath became a producer after she stopped acting. Vincent Price is hard to read, which makes him even scarier than usual. It's better looking than its tiny budget would suggest. Good bits: they enact the Monty Python "if she floats she's a witch" test, and we see people baking potatoes in the embers after a witch burning. Misc notes: - The director wanted Donald Pleasance for the villain, and would have made him more "twitchy" and perverse.
- He thought of the film as an "English western".
- He was very rude to Vincent Price, but others say this brought out a harder, more opaque character than he usually portrayed.
- The director died the next year at age 25.
- Ian Ogilvy has several thundering gallops with impressive tracking shots. The huge, powerful horse was called "Captain". He loved to run and it took a mile to slow him down and turn him around.
- Don Siegel showed this to Sam Peckinpah, who then hired the cinematographer for several of his own films.
- Filmed in the parts of England where the events actually occurred.
- Many of the named characters and events are historical, if freely adapted. Witchfinder Matthew Hopkins was not savagely chopped to death with an axe; he died in his bed.
Available on Blu-ray with a happy, uncensored commentary track by a film historian, leading man Ogilvy and one of the producers. They praise the restoration and point out that the fine original score is back. Apparently the original American distribution had substitute electronic music. This completes the Shout Factory Vincent Price Collection volume 1. The earlier titles: On to volume 2! 
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Post by wmcclain on Apr 13, 2020 18:27:31 GMT
The Oblong Box (1969), produced and directed by Gordon Hessler. After suffering unspeakable torture and mutilation in Africa, a plantation owner is kept chained in his room by his brother. It's for his own good. The insane inmate devises a cunning plan -- again using African magic -- to simulate death and escape via premature burial. What could go wrong? Well, what could go right? Brother Edward wears a unsettling crimson mask throughout. We don't see The Face until 1h30m in; honestly it's not that bad. The title is Poe's, not the story, although it does use plenty of his standard devices. A plot twist gives a counter-cultural slant: the colonials are the guilty ones and the Africans their innocent victims. Everyone says this pro-black sentiment caused the picture to be banned in Texas; is that true? Sounds like a story. This the second of three matches of Vincent Price with Hilary Heath (Dwyer); the others are Witchfinder General (1968) and Cry of the Banshee (1970). John Coquillon photographed all three; he later worked with Peckinpah. Featuring 19 year old Sally Geeson, looking much like her sister Judy:  The first big feature film by the director, who had worked for Alfred Hitchcock for many years. He was producing this and stepped in as director when Michael Reeves, director of Witchfinder General (1968), become unavailable because of mental instability and suicide attempts (he finally did kill himself shortly after). Available on Blu-ray from Kino. This is the director's cut. Lots of commentary overlap with Cry of the Banshee (1970). 
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Post by wmcclain on Apr 13, 2020 18:27:49 GMT
Cry of the Banshee (1970), directed by Gordon Hessler. Witches. Witches everywhere. Some are just peasant serving girls but it is fun to call them witches so their clothes can be torn off as they are sadistically degraded before being delivered to the torture dungeon for final disposition. But some are real witches meeting in the woods, following the Old Religion and worshiping Satan, calling on the Banshee to be their avenging fury. Who will be left standing in the end? This is often compared to Witchfinder General (1968); similar subject and sadistic tone, same cinematographer, and both have Vincent Price and Hilary Heath (Dwyer). The earlier film is historically more ambitious, this one is supernatural and has more of a Roger Corman look. This is actually the third and last match-up of Price and Dwyer; the second was The Oblong Box (1969). His quip: "You've played my wife, my mistress and my daughter; when you play my mother we get married". It was his last costume picture. The opening credits are animated by Terry Gilliam, the same style he was using for Month Python's Flying Circus around then:  Available on Blu-ray in Shout Factory's Vincent Price Collection III. It includes both the director's cut and the American International edit which has no boobage, less gore, rearranged scenes and a new score. The source is not as good as for the director's cut. A film scholar gives a detailed commentary track with loads of biographical information. He thinks this genre is an expression of 1960s political rebellion. Where Hammer films are a conservative holding action against vile supernatural creatures, the witchfinder movies indict the established powers. The writer and director wanted to make a counter-cultural statement where the witches were entirely free of evil, but that was not allowed. He likes Les Baxter's score for the AIP cut. 
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Post by Prime etc. on Apr 13, 2020 19:53:19 GMT
I didn't care for Cry of the Banshee, but I will rewatch it this July.
At a 1969 London speaking event (a week before the Oblong Box opened) Price didn't talk negatively about Reeves but did talk fondly of Hessler.
I agree that AIP has a "down with the system" theme while Hammer, although it does inject progressive messages (usually a visitor travels to a town where the people are incapable of dealing with the problem), is much more conservative. The typical Hammer ends with things returning to normal. Usually a male character successfully deals with the problem.
In Witchfinder General, Ogilvy is the likable male hero. He doesn't let the rape of his fiancee deter them from marriage, but by the end of the film, since it concludes with him (and her) half mad, what's the closure? It is very un-Hammer-like. The monster is not a foreign vampire, but the native system of the country.
Witchfinder General does feel like a western.
About Price's performance: I prefer him when he is hammy, and I am not fond of this one because he seems very sour and restrained (although it probably works better than if he had been "evil and loving it.").
Sterne is the "evil and loving it" character and I think has the most chilling line when he mocks the old woman.
Hopkins is the hypocritical self-righteous bureaucrat, Sterne is the thug who carries out his instructions.
So I think making Hopkins un-hammy is probably the right choice, but perhaps if Price had been willing to play it straight from the get-go, it would have been more energetic. Because he did occasionally do unhammy performances. I can't remember him being Hammy in Nefertiti Queen of the Nile and he certainly avoided it in An Evening Of Edgar Allen Poe.
Price: "Michael Reeves could not communicate with actors....I realised what he wanted was a low-key, very laid-back, menacing performance. He did get it, but I was fighting him almost every step of the way. Had I known what he wanted, I would have cooperated."
In one scene, Reeves needed Price to shoot his flintlock between the ears of the horse he was riding. When Price realised that Reeves had ordered that an actual blank charge was to be used so the weapon's puff of smoke would be visible, he shouted, "What? You want the gun to go bang between the ears of this fucking nag? How do you think he's going to react?" However, Reeves insisted and, when the gun went off, the horse reared and sent Price tumbling onto the ground. Price was not hurt but he was extremely angered by the incident.
Now I want to re-watch the AIP version to hear the Baxter score again.
Wikipedia has some interesting trivia:
Hollywood Citizen News was appalled by the film: "A disgrace to the producers and scripters, and a sad commentary on the art of filmmaking … a film with such bestial brutality and orgiastic sadism, one wonders how it ever passed customs to be released in this country."[14] The trade journal Box Office noted that: "Fans of the horror film will be glad to know that Vincent Price is back to add another portrait to his gallery of arch-fiends … bathed in the most stomach-churning gore imaginable …"[14] Variety opined that "Dwyer gives evidence of acting talent, but she and all principals are hampered by Michael Reeves's mediocre script and ordinary direction."[32] In a more favourable notice written for The New York Times, Renata Adler expressed that the film featured "any number of attractive young aspiring stars who seem to have been cast … mainly for their ability to scream. … Price has a good time as a materialistic witch-hunter and woman-disfigurer and dismemberer, and the audience at the dark, ornate New Amsterdam seemed to have a good time as well. There are lines like, "Take three good men and ride into East Anglia," through which a man behind me snored and a middle-aged couple next to him quarreled viciously, but people woke up for the action and particularly cheered when Price was hacked to death"
This is an interesting take:
Robin Wood wrote that "Witchfinder General is certainly [Reeves’] most successfully achieved work … what one is immediately struck by is the assurance and intensity of what is on the screen… the English countryside is felt as a real presence: it is difficult to think of other films in which it has been used so sensitively and meaningfully. With it is associated Paul Ferris’ theme-music, which suggests a traditional air without being actual quotation. Against the peace and fertility of nature is set the depravity of men."
Historical accuracy
Gaskill had several complaints regarding the film's "distortions and flights of fancy". While Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne really did torture, try and hang John Lowes, the vicar of Brandeston, Gaskill notes that other than those basic facts the film's narrative is "almost completely fictitious." In the movie, the fictional character of Richard Marshall pursues Hopkins relentlessly to death, but in reality the "gentry, magistrates and clergy, who undermined his work in print and at law" were in pursuit of Hopkins throughout his (brief) murderous career, as he was never legally sanctioned to perform his witch-hunting duties. Hopkins was also not axed to death, and instead "withered away from consumption at his Essex home in 1647". Price was 56 when he played Hopkins, but "the real Hopkins was in his 20s". According to Gaskill, one of the film's "most striking errors is its total omission of court cases: witches are simply tortured, then hanged from the nearest tree.
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