The Witches ** (1966, Joan Fontaine, Kay Walsh, Alec McCowen) – Classic Movie Review 3068

Director Cyril Frankel’s 1966 horror movie is a typical Hammer Films outing into the territory of black magic, the occult, voodoo and witchcraft. It features two effective performances – from a rather film-starry Joan Fontaine as Gwen Mayfield, the school teacher driven to a nervous breakdown and Kay Walsh as Stephanie Bax, the demonic woman who drives her there.

Gwen has a horrifying experience with the occult in Africa, a schoolteacher moves to a small English village, where she takes up a teaching job. However, she encounters Stephanie, whose strange brother Alan (Alec McCowen) is a religious fanatic with whom Gwen finds happiness in an odd twist in the tale.

Gwen is unlucky and finds that lightning strikes twice in the same place when black magic follows her to reside in England as well as Africa. And she finds the village is home to a coven of witches who plan to sacrifice a village girl in an evil bloody ritual. But, intriguing though it may be, the rest of the screen story is just witchcraft by numbers and unlikely to provoke too many nightmares.

Fontaine owned the rights to this occult thriller’s source novel The Devil’s Own by Norah Lofts (aka Peter Curtis) and persuaded Hammer to finance making a movie out of it. It is scripted by esteemed Quatermass author Nigel Kneale. But alas the result is a long way away from the far creepier tale in which she made her name, Rebecca.

Here, in what proved to be her last cinema film, Fontaine works hard to make it credible and gives a decent enough performance. But, even so, it’s largely her ever more distraught-looking hair that does most of the acting. It’s a classic example of hair acting.

Also in the cast are Gwen Ffrangcon Davies, John Collin, Michele Dotrice, Leonard Rossiter, Martin Stephens, Ann Bell, Ingrid Boulting (billed as Ingrid Brett), Duncan Lamont, Carmel McSharry, Viola Keats, Shelagh Fraser, Bryan Marshall, John Barrett, Rudolph Walker and Willie Payne.

Joan Fontaine died on December 15 2013, aged 96.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3068

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