1966’s The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) is another great opportunity to indulge the guilty pleasure of watching a once-glam Hollywood goddess at the tail end of her career being relentlessly monstered in a down-market movie. Think Joan Crawford in Trog or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings.
Here it’s Joan Fontaine getting the treatment, the one-time star of Rebecca, and Oscar-winner for Suspicion, returning to the land of her British parents to play a teacher recruited to run a primary school in a picture-postcard English village.
In Wicker Man style, Miss Mayfield does not realise that almost everyone in the village is involved in something untoward, and that one of her charges has been earmarked for special treatment – of a sacrificial variety.
Watching Fontaine and her helmet of Hollywood hair just driving a dinky little Riley Elf (an even more twee Mini) is a kind of fun in itself, and you could actually watch the whole film as an exercise in spotting when the star has had her hair teased – it goes up and down like a fire curtain. But to her credit Fontaine is as serious about the role as director Cyril Frankel is about his film. Hammer Films had taken the precaution of removing the snark from the screenplay Nigel Kneale originally wrote. Kneale, writer of sci-fi classics such as The Quatermass Experiment, thought witchcraft and all that supernatural stuff was nonsense.
But not in this film it isn’t. In a neatly graduated exercise in mounting paranoia, Fontaine plays the kindly and breezy Miss Mayfield as a woman becoming increasingly nervous. Against her a rake of actors playing types – Ingrid Boulting as sexy teenager Linda, Martin Stephens as bright lad Ronnie, Kay Walsh as blue-stocking journalist Stephanie, Alec McCowen as her oddball brother Alan, Gwen Ffrangcon Davies as the old herbalist who still believes in “the old ways”, Duncan Lamont as the jolly butcher. They’re like characters from Cluedo (aka Clue). Which one’s Colonel Mustard and who has the lead piping?
There are curlicues though. Alan, for instance, likes to pretend he is a cleric of some sort, and wears a dog collar. But he isn’t. And the film starts with a preamble set in caricature ongo-bongo Africa, where nice Miss Mayfield is a colonial something-or-other and bad juu-juu is in the air.
These plot turns take on a life of their own. Halfway through Miss Mayfield has a total breakdown, becomes amnesiac and is sequestered in an asylum for a year, before suddenly recovering her memory and returning to the village, where her young pupils have not aged at all.
So it doesn’t all add up and some of the plot deviations appear to be there just to ensure the film gets to the 90 minute mark (it’s 91 in fact). And yet it turns out OK, partly because director Frankel doesn’t bore us with overlong scenes, partly because it’s shot in bright and clear Technicolor (so looks great) by Hammer regular Arthur Grant and partly because of the determination by the entire cast to play it straight.
Fontaine is an older version of the second Mrs de Winter, in Rebecca, if you like, and here she is having a bit of fun with the sort of victim character she spent chunks of her career first embracing and then escaping.
The finale is big and mad and extravagant, with most of the characters we’ve met already turning up in coven scenes that look like a de-pornified sex movie done as expressive dance.
Feminists might like how female-centric it is, and how very weird or morally compromised almost all of the men in it are. The women aren’t necessarily the good guys but they make the running, for the most part, and know what they’re about. Unusual for Hammer.
The Witches (aka The Devil’s Own) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
