The Witches

Kudos to the multiple other posters who recognize this as a winner! It's hard, indeed, to understand why other Hammer fans ignore this entry, particularly since its script is far more literate than many of their other pictures from the same time frame. In any case, the Hammer production team does a wonderful job here of conveying the small village ambience and the screenplay follows Norah Loft's novel very closely. What makes this film so distinctive is its understatement--the horror when it emerges is all the more disquieting since everything seems so idyllic.

Miss Fontaine is superb. Note her scene near the beginning when she is questioned about her nervous breakdown during a job interview. She brings to the sequence and its halting tragic dialogue, the same reticent, diffident charm she displayed nearly 30 years earlier when she explained the death of her father to Olivier in "Rebecca." Eerily, these two scenes seem oddly connected despite the passage of time. What a pro she was!

All in all, "The Witches" is a star in both Hammer and Miss Fontaine's crown. Recommended.

I enjoyed this immensely, although it tends to get panned even by Hammer horror fans. Once the daft opening was over, I found it suitably chilling. The trio of central performances - namely Joan Fontaine, Alec McCowen and Kay Walsh - are great, and it really benefits from Richard Rodney Bennett's typically expert score. It prefigures The Wicker Man in its tale of an outsider coming to a village wrapped up in occultic religion, and also has a hint of The Birds, which I'm sure can't be coincidental - Fontaine sports a hairstyle and costume strikingly similar to those of Tippi Hedren in some scenes!

The Witches aka The Devil's Own is an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Hammer to make a serious(ish) movie about witchcraft. Nigel Kneale's screenplay displays some of his customary intelligence, but here he seems hindered by working not from an original story but by adapting Norah Loft's novel. A deathly pale Joan Fontaine is the schoolteacher recovering from a nervous breakdown who takes a job in an outwardly idyllic English village only to gradually suspect that there are darker forces at work - although this could just be in her own imagination. Of course, we know that she's clearly bonkers after her horrible offscreen experience at the hands of witchdoctors in Africa (well, a soundstage in Bray) while the credits were running, but we also know that just because she's had one turn of the screw too many doesn't mean there aren't real witches at work...

It's good at the unpleasant undercurrents in ostensibly beautiful small country towns and also looks at the attraction witchcraft has for women of a certain age (it's a power thing, apparently, with magic as a substitute for waning sexual power). Unfortunately, it goes downhill pretty fast once the cat is, quite literally, out of the bag and the last reel orgy plays more like a bad amateur modern dance performance that goes on forever than a terrifying pagan ritual (the silly costume doesn't help, although it's probably the only 60s film to feature faecophiliacs at play if that's your thing).

This movie is based on a novel, which goes by the titles "The Devil's Own", "The Little Wax Doll", and "Catch as Catch Can", depending on your geographical location and book edition.

The author is Norah Lofts, writing under the psuedonym Peter Curtis for "The Devil's Own", a wonderful author of English historical fiction. Her novels are fairly inexpensive and easy to find. Give the book a try!

In her last appearance on the silver screen, Joan Fontaine, who won an Academy Award for her performance in Suspicion (1941), stars in this Hammer Studios release of The Witches (1967). While the material here is certainly not of the caliber of some of the previous films she's appeared in, it is fun to watch. Maybe I have some lurid fascination of seeing once great stars reduced to appearing in roles they probably would have never considered in their prime.

Joan plays Gwen Mayfield, a teacher who has just been accepted to assume a position as head teacher of a private school in a small English village. The film starts off with Gwen teaching at a mission school in Africa, and, after an incident with a native witch doctor that caused Gwen to have a nervous breakdown, she has now returned to England to put the pieces of her life back together.

After formally meeting with her employers, Alan and Stephanie Bax, played by Alec McCowen and Kay Walsh respectively, the well-to-do resident benefactors of the town who are also brother and sister, Gwen settles into her new surroundings. The situation seems idyllic, a nice, quiet position in a small town where little happens, but, as the saying goes, still waters sometimes run deep. The oddness begins when two of her pre-teen students, a boy and a very weird girl, exhibit closeness to each other, one borne of a budding romance. This causes consternation among some of the townspeople, and soon the boy falls ill of a mysterious coma. Apparently there was more than just a passing concern about what might happen if the relationship between these two continued, specifically in respect to the girl.

Rumors of witchery begin to reach Gwen, and the deeper she probes, the more ominous the proceedings. As the notion of witchery becomes more and more viable, the idea that there may be more than one witch, a coven, operating within the town, involving various members of the small village. Gwen soon finds herself at odds with unseen forces, and suffers a relapse, forcing her to be institutionalized. She has also lost her memory of everything that's transpired after leaving Africa. She does regain her memory, bits at a time, and the horror begins to return as she understands what is about to transpire, and rushes back to the town in an attempt to save the girl from an unknown fate, and ultimately learn that witchery is not limited to third world peoples but is alive and well here in this small, English village.

Joan Fontaine does a great job here, still exhibiting the sheen of a Hollywood star, even if some of that sheen has dulled since her prime. I have to say, even pushing 50 she still looked pretty good, despite the oddish, bowl bouffant she sported through most of the film. Fontaine's older sister, Olivia de Havilland, didn't fare as well, career wise, in my opinion, starring in dubious films like Lady in a Cage (1964), and Irwin Allen 70's disaster pics like Airport '77 (1977) and The Swarm (1978). The creepy factor develops nicely as the film progresses, and as the mystery deepens about who's involved in the coven and what their purpose is, but this is soon replaced by a goofy factor as we see the coven in action, performing a ritual, half-nekkid dance of sorts in a decrepit, abandoned church, eating greasy dirt as their leader spouts incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo while clad in colorful robes and donning a crown with birthday candles adorning the top. I kept waiting for someone to make a wish and blow out the candles, but the others were to busy bumping and grinding to their chanting, and, as I said before, masticating the mud.

Anchor Bay Entertainment releases a great print, in wide screen anamorphic format. Special features include a theatrical trailer, television promotional spots and a World of Hammer episode titled Wicked Women. Also included in the DVD case on the flipside of the card listing the chapter stops is a reproduction of promotional material used for the film. I really find much enjoyment in these little touches, as it seems to indicate thought was actually put into the release, and a sense that one's getting their money's worth, even though this release seems a bit pricey.

Cookieman108