Witchfinder General
Reviewed by Dr Malcolm Gaskill, fellow and director of studies in history at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's witches (4th Estate, 2001). His definitive study of the Witchfinder General story is Witchfinders: A 17th-century English tragedy (John Murray, 2005).
RATING: 3
UK, 1968
US title The Conqueror Worm
Director Michael Reeves
Executive Producer Tony Tenser
Screenwriters Michael Reeves and Tom Baker
From the book by Ronald Bassett
Cinematographer Johnny Coquillon
Music Paul Ferris
Art direction Jim Morahan
Cast Vincent Price (Matthew Hopkins), Ian Ogilvy (Richard Marshall), Rupert Davies (John Lowes), Hilary Dwyer (Sarah Lowes), Robert Russell (John Stearne), Nicky Henson (Robert Swallow), Patrick Wymark (Oliver Cromwell), Wilfred Brambell (Master Loach)
There is much to be said in favour of Witchfinder General – but as a film, not as history. Its tragically short-lived director, Michael Reeves (who died of a drug overdose at the age of only 25), breathed new life into the tired Gothic horror genre with this period-piece about love and loss, exploitation and vengeance.
Suffolk and Vietnam
The story is played out not on the claustrophobic sets of Hammer's productions but against the pastoral beauty of the Suffolk countryside: livestock grazing, dappled sunlight, birdsong. And yet this is 1645 and England is mired in a bloody civil war, where brother fights brother and justice has lost its way. In all God's creation, Reeves appears to be saying, the most savage force is humanity’s folly and cruelty.
You get the general idea. Cinema audiences in 1968, conscious of what was happening in Vietnam, must have as well. The film is shocking, and Michael Reeves was satisfied that reviewers (notably playwright Alan Bennett) found it degrading because, he argued, violence is degrading.
But, as ever with historical films, the problem lies in how far that emotional power derives from the premise that a true story is being told. The screenplay was based not on academic research, but on a novel by Ronald Bassett that self-consciously manipulated the known facts. The result: a travesty of historical truth.
The set-up
The earliest scenes of the film attempt to establish its credentials as a reliable account. We open on an idyllic Suffolk hillside, the peace broken by the sound of a gallows being hammered together. Cut to a screaming woman being dragged through the streets by grim-faced peasants, led by a pious clergyman. As she is hanged, the camera pans away and refocuses on a mounted figure in the distance: Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General.
After the opening credits, a voice-over informs us that ‘The structure of law and order has collapsed. Local magistrates indulge their individual whims. Justice and injustice are dispensed in more or less equal quantities without opposition.’ Hopkins is taking advantage of this situation, 'torturing and killing in a supposed drive to eliminate witchcraft from the country' with the full blessing of the law.
Stop right there. During the Civil War, the administration of justice was disrupted, but it never collapsed, nor was Matthew Hopkins given an official mandate to hunt witches.
The historical evidence gives an impression of a man for whom, from the first interrogations in March 1645, time was running out. But in real life, the witchfinder was not pursued by the galloping cavalry officer Cornet Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy) – a fictional character, anyway – but by gentry, magistrates and clergy, who undermined his work in print and at law. And amid all its distortions and flights of fancy, 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.
The hidden reality
What really happened in Suffolk was quite different. When news of gaols overflowing with witches reached London, a special legal commission was appointed, which then conducted a large number of trials at Bury St Edmunds. Hopkins himself never ordered anyone to be hanged, here or anywhere else. England was chaotic for a while in the 1640s, but never anarchic.
Michael Reeves' Hopkins is a cynical lawyer, motivated by sex and money. Judging by his appearance – Vincent Price was 56 when the film was made – he was probably at the end of his career. The real Hopkins was in his 20s, the son of a Puritan clergyman, for whom proof of legal experience is scant. He was probably driven by a sincere belief that the Devil was at large and that witches threatened the godly commonwealth. Many of his contemporaries felt the same. It was just that not all agreed with Hopkins’ methods of extracting confessions.
A quick word about John Stearne, Hopkins' associate in the witch-hunt. In the film, he is portrayed by Robert Russell as an ale-guzzling, wench-groping thug, in contrast to a more restrained, censorious and sanctimonious Hopkins. At one point, Stearne refers to Hopkins as 'a fancy boy', whatever that might imply. However, this is all made up and utterly unconvincing.
Patrick Wymark cameos briefly as Cromwell, a dyspeptic aphorist holding court at a groaning table. Wymark, who liked a drink himself, may have thought he was playing Dr Johnson.
Losing the plot
The film cannot be judged historically on its plot, which is almost wholly fictitious. Cornet Marshall is in love with the ravishingly beautiful Sarah (Hilary Dwyer), niece of John Lowes (Rupert Davies), vicar of Brandeston. Marshall's quest for vengeance begins when Lowes is ‘swum’ as a witch (that is, put in water to sink or swim – if you did the latter, you were deemed a witch) and hanged, despite Sarah having slept with Hopkins to spare his life. It all adds interest and pace, and might be acceptable if it were seen as a fictional part of the story. But it isn’t.
The vicar of Brandeston really was called John Lowes, who was swum (in the moat at Framlingham Castle, not at Kentwell Hall) and hanged as a witch (at Bury, not from a tree). The troubled relationship between the real Lowes and his parishioners stretched back over 30 years and touched on many areas of political, religious and cultural conflict in English life prior to the Civil War.
But we learn nothing of this. Nor is the film concerned with the complex and involving reasons why so many people believed that witches possessed the power to attack them through the use of diabolical magic.
The end
Not unreasonably for a feature film, most screen time is a preparation for the climactic scene in the dungeon at Orford Castle. Hopkins and Stearne torture Richard and Sarah, then Richard breaks free and takes Hopkins to bits with a (very rubbery) axe. Bassett's novel stuck to the legend that Hopkins was hoist by his own petard – tried by the water ordeal, then hanged as a sorcerer. The reality was more bathetic: he withered away from consumption at his Essex home in 1647.
Unlike novelists and film-makers, historians observe the mundane as well as the sensational, and are obliged to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Chances are, however, that a different type of good story emerges when they do.
