The Witches
Director: Cyril
Frankel
Year: 1966
Rating: 6.0
This
Hammer film straddles the line between horror and Dennis Wheatley styled
occult. The book it is based on was not Wheatley but instead The Devil's
Own by female writer Norah Lofts using Peter Curtis as her pen name. Interestingly,
it was actress Joan Fontaine who got the rights to the book and went to Hammer
with the option to make it into a film. Hammer hired Nigel Kneale
(a bunch of the Quatermass films) to write the script. At the time it was
an unusual type of film for Hammer but foreshadowed The Devil Rides Out and
To the Devil a Daughter that were produced later on. Fontaine at the ripe
old age of 48-years-old (for Hollywood) had not been able to get a good part
for four years and perhaps seeing Bette Davis and Joan Crawford getting work
in horror films, thought she could do the same. In fact, Davis had starred
in Hammer's The Nanny just the year before. I really respect these actresses
who had been such huge stars once upon a time and famed for their looks to
be willing to be Horror Queens at this point in their lives.
Fontaine still looks great but she was a
few years past her classic films like Suspicion, Jane Eyre and Rebecca. Apparently,
she became quite ill during the filming and she appeared in nothing else
till 1975 - a Cannon episode of all things. This is directed by Cyril Frankel
(Never Take Candy from a Stranger) and he does a slow building of unease
through the film that is quite well done - until the climax which is so nutty
I can't imagine what they were thinking. It starts off with a jump scare
though as Gwen (Fontaine) is in Haiti and is terrified out of her wits by
a witch doctor in full regalia. She has a nervous breakdown and goes back
to England where she gets a job as a teacher in a small quaint English village.
What could be better for recuperating from her illness.
Ah, those quiet English villages. As Miss
Marple would have told her, there is as much evil there as anywhere. Little
hints worm their way into your brain - the way the butcher (Duncan Lamont)
rubs his bloody knife like an object of affection, that the village has no
church, the grandmother who put her granddaughter's (Ingrid Boulting) hand
through a wringer as punishment or a doll in a tree with needles stuck in
it. When Granny tells her black cat to follow Gwen and it does, you definitely
know something is not quite right in this village. At one point sheep stampede
over her and she ends up in the house of her friends - Alan (Alex McCowen)
and his sister Stephanie (Kay Walsh). Another fright puts her in a nursing
home being tended by our good friend Reginald Perrin aka Leonard Rossiter.
She starts snooping again and finds herself in a coven which seems dedicated
to wearing rags as clothes and performing modern dance routines around their
witch. The butcher, the baker and the candle stick maker. All in torn clothes
as if they don't want to get the blood sacrifice on their Sunday best. It
may be the weirdest thing I have seen in a while and is incredibly anti-climatic.
A ten-year-old could have come up with a better ending.
