The bizarre history of Britain’s ‘Roast Beef Westerns’

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.