FADE IN
EXT. SUFFOLK GARDEN, SUMMER’S DAY, 1958
Michael Reeves. Home from school for the long summer holiday.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Languid days in the garden and cigarettes behind the shed. Then writing long into the night, scripts meticulously formatted with pencil and ruler: character, action, dialogue, transition. Stories of conflict and movement, travelling through landscapes, real and imagined. Suffolk was his canvas, a landscape which could be imagined as anywhere.
FLASH CUT – – RURAL SUFFOLK (STOCK, INCLUDING KENTWELL HALL AND ORFORD CASTLE)
DISSOLVE TO
EXT. RADLEY COLLEGE. DUSK
Michael slips out by side entrance and heads towards town.
EXT. CINEMA. NIGHT
CUT TO
Poster for Invasion of the Body Snatchers
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Michael goes to see the film three times in one week trying to work out how Don Siegel achieves those tracking shots with such effortlessness and fluidity.
CUT TO
EXT. GARDEN AGAIN, SUMMER’S DAY
Michael directs and films another boy and a girl
NARRATOR (V.O.)
He practices the technique, using his mother’s tea trolley as a dolly, camera lashed to the front and him clinging to the back with his knees. Ian does the pushing; handsome, stupid, good-natured Ian: the perfect ingénue.
Fifteen years old and he films his first feature. A girl is being stalked and he casts Ian as the villain. Michael plays the hero; both friends playing against type. His infatuation is not so much about what appears on the screen, that’s just another end-product. The excitement is in the process of creation. To yearn after a project, thinking about it all the time, then to seduce it, moulding it to one’s will, and finally to bring it to a climax using all the skills you’ve culled from watching the work of others.
EXT. 1960S JETLINER LANDING (STOCK)
CUT TO
EXT. LOS ANGELES. DAY(STOCK)
DISSOLVE TO
EXT. FRONT DOOR OF HOLLYWOOD HOUSE
Michael rings the doorbell
TRACKING SHOT ALL ROUND MICHAEL AND BACK TO DOOR
NARRATOR (V.O.)
It was a crazy idea, going to the States aged just seventeen, with a battered brown holdall and a steely ambition. Even crazier to ring Don Siegel’s front doorbell.
MICHAEL
You don’t know me Mr Siegel but I’ve come all the way from England because I’m your biggest fan. I’m talented and I want a job making films. You won’t regret saying yes, I promise you.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
But something about the kid convinces Don into saying yes, scares him into saying yes, and Michael, all confidence and swagger, is pitched into the role of production assistant. He works first on The Long Ships and then on Castle of the Living Dead.
FOOTAGE FROM BOTH FILMS BEHIND VOICE OVER
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Behind the youthful bravado Michael begins to show real talent. He impresses producer Paul Maslansky so much that he is given the director’s chair for a B-movie being shot in Italy, Revenge of the Blood Beast. Naturally, he finds a role in the film for Ian. Ian features again in Michael’s next project, a film called The Sorcerers produced back in England.
FOOTAGE FROM REVENGE OF THE BLOOD BEAST BEHIND VOICE OVER
NARRATOR (V.O.)
But Michael’s big coup is the chance to direct a major Hollywood star, albeit one in the twilight of his career. Boris Karloff plays a scientist who devises a way to control the mind and actions of others and thereby is enabled vicariously to enjoy the illicit thrills of swinging London. The parallels with 1960s cinema – voyeuristically enjoying the delights of the permissive society – are obvious. Naturally, Ian is Karloff’s unfortunate puppet in the film.
FOOTAGE FROM THE SORCERORS – – BORIS KARLOFF AND IAN OGILVY
NARRATOR (V.O.)
But it was another horror film which established Michael Reeves’s reputation as a truly creative director. Witchfinder General is set at the time of the English Civil War but, in its narrative format, more closely resembles a western; a tale of violent crime, pursuit and equally violent revenge.
Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkins, a ‘witch-finder’ given licence by Cromwell’s authorities to roam East Anglia with his henchman, John Stearne, searching for witches. Their reign of terror involves torture, sexual assault and murder, all for Hopkins’s gratification and financial gain.
FOOTAGE OF VINCENT PRICE AS MATTHEW HOPKINS
NARRATOR (V.O.)
When Hopkins and Stearne turn their attentions on a young woman and her uncle, a village priest, they invoke the wrath of her fiancé, an officer in Cromwell’s army. The officer is played by Ian Ogilvy, naturally, and his pursuit of the Witchfinder General is relentless and his revenge bloody.
Michael Reeves coaxes an outstanding performance from Price, though their relationship was not without friction.
PRICE (V.O.)
I have made eighty-four movies, young man. How many have you made?
REEVES (V.O.)
Two very good ones.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
But the star of Witchfinder General is the landscape of Suffolk. Its woods, its rolling meadows, its country lanes, its villages. But, above all else, the skyscapes of Suffolk, which Reeves presents as almost Turneresque in their glowering beauty. These skies are captured with painterly craftsmanship by John Coquillon using his trusty Arriflex camera.
FOOTAGE FROM WITCHFINDER GENERAL BEHIND VOICE OVER, SUFFOLK LANDSCAPE AND SKIES
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Witchfinder General, for all its gore and amorality, is Michael Reeves’s love letter to the county of his childhood; to the landscape of his memory and imagination.
DISSOLVE TO STOCK FOOTAGE OF SWINGING SIXTIES LONDON
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Following the success of Witchfinder General, Reeves’s career seemed as if it was about to go into overdrive. He was bombarded with scripts and offers from Hollywood. But he subsided into an unexpected depressive inertia, finding comfort only in booze and pills.
The delights of Swinging London and hip California flung themselves at his feet but, somehow, none of it seemed to be enough to lift his mood. One evening in February 1969 Reeves came home alone to his flat in Cadogan Place, Knightsbridge. Drunk, but unable to sleep, he took a handful of anti-depressants and went back to bed. He never woke up.
BLACK AND WHITE FOOTAGE OF GARDENS AT GOLDERS GREEN CREMATORIUM
Whether Michael Reeves’s death was a deliberate act of his own making or a tragic accident we will never know. But his passing at the age of just twenty-five deprived British cinema of one its greatest talents; a barely fulfilled talent.
DISSOLVE TO BLACK SCREEN
SOUND of ‘Fade into You’ by Mazzy Star
ROLL DEDICATION AND CREDITS
This film is dedicated to the memory of the women and men of Suffolk who were tortured and killed at the hands of the real Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, in the Bury St Edmunds atrocity of 27th August 1645:
Anne Alderman – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Bacon – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Clowes – hanged 27th August 1645
Thomas Everard – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Everard – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Fuller – hanged 27th August 1645
Anne Leech – hanged August 1645
Jane Linstead – hanged 27th August 1645
John Lowes, Vicar of Brandeston – hanged 27th August 1645
Susan Manners – hanged 27th August 1645
Rebecca Morris – hanged 27th August 1645
Jane Rivet – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Skipper – hanged 27th August 1645
Mary Smith – hanged 27th August 1645
Margery Sparham – hanged 27th August 1645
Sarah Spindler – hanged 27th August 1645
Katherine Tooly – hanged 27th August 1645
Anne Wright – hanged 27th August 1645
BLACK SCREEN. SILENCE.
For further information on the locations used in the filming of Witchfinder General, follow this link
