The Telegraph
By Tim Robey
April 22, 2024
Seeing as the British film industry is now thought to
have been responsible for the first known Western, it might seem curious that
our other contributions to that fabled genre are so few and far between.
In 1899, the Mitchell and Kenyon company, a pioneering
film collective based in Blackburn, made a silent short called Kidnapping by
Indians, which unfolds over a single two-minute shot. Featuring tomahawks,
head-dresses, much discharging of pistols, and scenery being set on fire, it’s
unmistakably a Lancashire-based take on the Wild West, predating Edwin S
Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), which was previously thought to be
cinema’s ur-Western. The filmmakers were inspired by the tales of British cotton
workers, who’d gone to America after the Civil War and came back with thrilling
stories of the wild frontier.
Why, then, did no firm tradition of British Westerns – or
“roast beef Westerns”, as they’ve been dubbed – later emerge? The obstacles,
both cultural and geographical, are quite clear. We don’t have deserts. We
settled in the Dark Ages. Any frontier mentality we nurture is arguably more
coastal (or naval) than it is inland. As François Truffaut once remarked to
Alfred Hitchcock, our weather is fundamentally uncinematic, too. Plus, do
British actors really look as good as Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott when they
saddle up?
For all these reasons, the very few famous instances of
British Westerns have tended to be spoofs. Consider the likes of Carry on
Cowboy (1965), with Sid James as a trigger-happy varmint called “The Rumpo
Kid”, and Joan Sims as a sharp-shooting saloon owner. (That year was prime time
for lampooning the genre – Hollywood’s answer was Cat Ballou, with an
Oscar-winning Lee Marvin in a double role.)
Edgar Wright’s semi-professional debut A Fistful of
Fingers (1995), made when he was just 20, is a more contemporary example. The
combination of Britishness and Western lends itself almost automatically, it
seems, to bumbling pastiche. That film has a character known only as “Squint”,
and EastEnders’s Nicola Stapleton as “Floozy”, not to mention Jeremy Beadle as
himself. (“The Greatest Western Ever Made… in Somerset!”, ran the poster copy.)
You can argue the toss over a few earlier Westerns, in
the genre’s mid-century heyday, being at least semi-British. Savage Guns
(1961), sometimes called the first spaghetti Western, was shot in Spain with
American stars (Richard Basehart, Don Taylor), but it was overseen by Brits
with Hammer associations: directed by Michael Carreras (the producer of
Hammer’s Dracula and Frankenstein films) and produced by their screenwriter,
Jimmy Sangster. Meanwhile, Raoul Walsh’s The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958) was
partly shot at Pinewood Studios, and starred our very own Kenneth More as a
gadget designer who stumbles into small-town law enforcement, opposite Jayne
Mansfield as – guess what? – a bombshell saloon owner.
Again, though, this was a comedy of the fish-out-of-water
variety. Back then, there weren’t many ways of spinning a British Western as
anything but. The journalist Paul Simpson, citing “lack of landscape” and “the
pointlessness of competing with the Americans”, once argued that “Britain’s
contribution to the Western has been on a par with Switzerland’s contribution
to naval warfare.”
A scholarly paper on the “roast beef Western”, from the
man who coined that term, the film historian Sheldon Hall, paints a somewhat
more complex picture. Hall takes us down all the byways of this oft-aborted
subgenre, and digs out almost every candidate available, including Michael
Winterbottom’s The Claim (2000), starring Peter Mullan – a transplanting of
Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge to the snowy mountains of northern
California, two decades after the 1849 Gold Rush. I had high hopes for that film
when it came out. The turgid results were acutely disappointing, and it
vanished without trace at the box office.
Hall strangely omits the one film I believe stands tall
as the lone great example of a British Western – probably because it’s one in disguise.
It’s a starkly gripping period epic with horseback chases, bawdy tavern scenes,
and a bloodcurdling core of vindictiveness which erupts into savage violence.
It even has a Civil War setting – only, in this instance, it’s the English
Civil War.
The film in question is Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder
General (1968). It is far more commonly classed as horror, thanks to the bleak
focus on religious persecution, torture scenes during witch trials, and the
starring presence of Vincent Price, who was past his sell-by date as a macabre
ham in his Poe cycle for Roger Corman.
Yet if you look past its chilling treatment of Price’s
character, the real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, many aspects of Reeves’s
film are blatantly indebted to American Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s –
especially the revenge Westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. With its
lynch-mob hysteria, isn’t this also our very own answer to Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar (1954), which has Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small igniting a
fiery vendetta against Joan Crawford’s butch saloonkeeper?
The screenwriter and playwright John Logan (Gladiator,
Skyfall) has delved into the making of Witchfinder General for his new play
Double Feature, an intertwined diptych about behind-the-scenes combat on a pair
of 1960s films shot in the UK. Half the play focuses on the skirmishes between
Price (as played by a dead-on Jonathan Hyde) and Reeves (a cringing Rowan
Polonski), who fought bitterly about the sardonic camp of Price’s customary
acting style. The focus switches alternately throughout to Alfred Hitchcock and
Tippi Hedren during the equally embattled making of Marnie, four years earlier.
“Michael Reeves”, says Logan, “was a cineaste of the
highest order – he lived and breathed cinema. He didn’t read books, didn’t
listen to music. He woke up every morning to watch and learn about movies. He
wanted to be on the cutting edge of his medium and do something provocative.”
As Reeves remarked while making Witchfinder General, he
very much saw it as a 17th century British Western in the style of a Boetticher
picture. At that time, the whole identity of commercial filmmaking was in flux.
America had entered Vietnam, campus protest was erupting, and a cinema pitting
good guys straightforwardly against bad, in the fashion of John Ford’s
Stagecoach (1939), seemed hopelessly out of date, unless you were John Wayne.
Meanwhile, Sam Peckinpah was shooting The Wild Bunch (1969), which would foment a revolution by making it hard to pick a side. As Logan puts it, “From the very moment that William Holden says, ‘If they move, kill ’em’ at the start, The Wild Bunch changed the equation for American movies, and American Westerns in particular.
Over in Italy, the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone
were also “profoundly important” to Reeves. “Because Leone was able to take
almost a Grand Guignol approach to filmmaking, apply it to a Western, and put
heaps of DayGlo blood into it. So I think all of that must have been swirling
in Michael Reeves’s imagination when he set out to make Witchfinder General.”
The relevance of Vietnam to a young filmmaker such as
Reeves – a 24-year-old firebrand, whose third and final feature this was – is
also fascinating to speculate upon. The protest movement had become global by
1968, with an estimated 10,000 people gathering in Trafalgar Square that March.
“Certainly in America,” says Logan, “people saw their brothers going off to
war, going off to unbelievable hardship, and coming back as different people.
The corrosive effect of violence, either violence to oneself, or violence
committed on other people, was everywhere. So for Michael Reeves, the English
Civil War may very well have served as a metaphor. No good guys, no bad guys –
and that’s the point.”
Witchfinder General has gained a cult status, especially
over here, as seriously strong meat – a severe, uncompromising drama about the
consequences of violence and the hypocrisy of moral crusades. As Logan admits,
American audiences haven’t always fully understood it. “Because they don’t
understand British history, they don’t know about the Battle of Naseby, and
they’re not quite sure who Oliver Cromwell was.”
Indeed, the film’s American distributor, AIP, was so
uncertain about Witchfinder as a commercial prospect that they retitled it The
Conqueror Worm, recut it with Price reading out the poem of that name, and
tried to pass it off as his latest Poe adaptation. All of this was done without
Reeves’s prior knowledge or consent, which, at the very least, demoralized the
young director. It must have done “a lot of damage”, Logan suggests, to his
already fragile mental health. (He would die of a barbiturates and alcohol
overdose a year later, which may or may not have been suicide.)
The tragedy of Reeves’s career was going out on such a
high. Not only is Witchfinder General one of the greatest British genre pieces
of that or any period, but it’s also the site of Price’s finest performance,
murder though it was – as the play amply illustrates – to extract it from him.
Logan remarks that Westerns are often the place where
established star personas undergo their most unsettling makeovers. Look at
James Stewart in his vengeful westerns for Mann (The Naked Spur, The Man From
Laramie), and consider what they did to the usually unimpeachable Henry Fonda,
to have him saddle up as a shady freelance marshal in Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock
(1959), and as the blue-eyed bad guy in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968). Reeves, in turn, stripped away all the usual hallmarks of Price’s
villainy to present Hopkins as a grey man, a stony nemesis at your door – an
accountant with a death warrant.
“At the moment of Witchfinder General,” says Logan, “he
was still known as the camp, over-the-top Vincent Price.” Audiences were
growing tired of his florid theatrics, and AIP was even considering cancelling
his contract. “But then afterwards, he suddenly has this flourish of The
Abominable Dr Phibes, and Theatre of Blood, and Madhouse – these unbelievably
great, latter-career, indelible performances.
“Michael Reeves was able, I think, partly by persuasion,
and partly by assault, to change that perspective. For my money, Witchfinder
General is the great performance in Vincent Price’s career. Because he’s
reduced to ashes – in terms of a soul.”
If Witchfinder General will take some dislodging from its rightful place as cinema’s greatest example of a “roast beef Western”, it’s pleasing to note that the small screen is finally showing an interest in reviving the form. We have just had Hugo Blick’s The English – a six-part BBC/Amazon co-production with a largely British cast going out West, headed by Emily Blunt’s vengeful aristocrat. But if you want an example of the grudge match between a flinty marshal and a psychotic outlaw brought to our very doorsteps – well, those of Hebden Bridge – look no further than Happy Valley. The British Western is, it seems, in fine fettle – if you know where to find it.
