A Tribute to Vincent Price: Witchfinder General (1968)
by Keri O’ Shea
East Anglia, England. The year is 1645 and the English Civil War is raging, as armies loyal to the King battle with Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Times are uncertain; the men are hungry, tired and ill-equipped, not to mention finding themselves in flux, fighting against former neighbours, leaving their old communities. Their preoccupation and absence feeds into feelings of desperation and fear in those they leave behind in already trying times and, as desperation gives way to irrationality, opportunists arise who are willing to exploit the superstitious weaknesses of others. This, the voiceover of 1968’s Witchfinder General tells us, is precisely how the lawyer-turned-witchfinder Matthew Hopkins has come to power, using his mandate against ‘heresy’ for personal gain.
When New Model Army soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy) takes a leave of absence to visit his betrothed, Sarah Lowes (Hilary Dwyer) he’s informed by her guardian and uncle, the local priest (Rupert Davies) that strange times are approaching: threats have been made against the family on account of their ‘Papist’ background, and he believes it is unsafe for Sarah to remain in the village. Marshall can do little about this whilst on active service however, and must return to his men. Meanwhile, the ice-cold Hopkins (Price) and his assistant John Stearne (Robert Russell) have indeed been called into town by fellow villagers’ accusations against the Lowes family, arriving soon after Marshall’s departure.
The priest and the girl are tortured, and while Sarah offering herself to Hopkins in a desperate attempt to save her uncle is effective at first, ultimately ‘God’s work’ has to go on and the priest is included in one of Hopkins’s trials (which are harrowing not least because the methods shown on film are historically accurate) before all of the accused are hanged. When by chance Marshall hears of these atrocities in Brandeston he risks court marshal to ride back there, finding his fiancée a broken woman. Vowing revenge, Marshall begins to track Hopkins and Stearne: Hopkins, acting like a cornered animal, knows that his only chance of thwarting the now seriously unhinged soldier is to use his legal powers to try him as a witch, and so Marshall must act quickly.
This is a brief summary and it does little to evoke the striking atmosphere of unease which pervades the film. From its earliest scenes – the low (often absent) light, the muted colours, and the realistic, rather than stylised terror of the first suspected witch – we can see that director Michael Reeves had a vision quite apart from the much more lurid period pieces which fellow British studio Hammer was producing during the same period.
It is also a role quite unlike any of Vincent Price’s earlier works. Price, as Matthew Hopkins, has a markedly reduced amount of screen time compared to his other appearances and, when he does appear, his trademark overblown acting style is absent. From his earliest appearance here however, and throughout the film, he exudes quiet brooding and menace, and his presence can be felt even when he is not on-screen: he’s emblematic of the type of corruption and hostility which is born out of such discordant times. Price also exudes a world-weariness here never seen before: the people around his character are unimportant unless they can be used, and his contempt for those around him is palpable.
Those emotions weren’t simply invented for the camera. Price had reached an impasse in his career by the end of the 1960s, and his experience on the set of Witchfinder General was not a positive one. By now in his late fifties, he was surrounded by a cast of relative unknowns and under the sway of an irate twenty-four year old director who didn’t want him in his film in the first place (Reeves wanted Donald Pleasence to play Hopkins, not some archaic character actor). Add to this the cold – Suffolk, England in October has the sort of chill that will stick to your bones – and the painful back injury which Price suffered when he fell from a horse during the first day of filming, and it’s easy to see where Price might have drawn elements of his performance. The animosity between himself and Reeves definitely exacerbated this situation; never keen on Price’s style, Reeves criticised him relentlessly, asking again and again for scenes to be reshot until he was satisfied that Price’s performance had been pared down to its bare minimum. A rumoured exchange between Price and Reeves went thus: ‘I’ve made ninety films – what have you made?’ asked Price. Reeves responded pithily, ‘Two good ones’. Whether or not it really happened, it neatly encapsulates the distance between actor and director. Yet, for all the bad blood between them, the end result is one of the stand-out roles of Price’s long, distinguished career.
If Reeves was despairing about the performance of one of his lead actors, he was equally unhappy about having the most violent of his scenes cut from the film by an overzealous censor. The end result is that we see very little blood in the film – but, to me, it feels no less violent for that. On the contrary, the realist style of the trials and executions through the course of the film make for amongst the nastiest scenes I’ve seen in horror, and Witchfinder General is an incredibly bleak horror: from its opening, through the intense joylessness it carries with it throughout, to the bitter chalice served to Marshall at its close, the real bitterness and unhappiness behind the scenes adds to the palpably nasty atmosphere overall. It isn’t a perfect piece of cinema, but it’s an interesting one and, via a process which was at best inconvenient and at worst degrading to its illustrious co-star Vincent Price, it generates one of his most interesting performances. As much as I enjoy Price’s brand of high Gothic, Witchfinder General – by luck and by judgement – shows that Price was also capable of doing something else entirely. In fact, when I think about Price’s career, Matthew Hopkins is one of the roles which come to mind as amongst his best, and one of his quotes in the film – “Men sometimes have strange motives for the things they do” – seems to sum up this brooding film nicely.
