by Jason Adams
Tell me if you've heard this plot before: a closed-minded outsider with a sordid spiritual history comes to a rural UK village where they slowly unravel a plot involving each and every member of the town being in on the ritual sacrifice of a virginal young woman, with a twist. You're thinking The Wicker Man, right? Well seven years before Christopher Lee did his exuberant little dance beside that infamous flaming totem Joan Fontaine got there first in 1966's The Witches, an actual Hammer production (I always think The Wicker Man is from Hammer, but it ain't) that really doesn't get the love it earns...
Joan plays Gwen Mayfield, a Christian Missionary who in an opening flashback is seen being surrounded by marauding witch doctors in Africa. (This movie has some great big Race Issues, for sure.) Cut to some time later (after a nervous breakdown, it seems) and Gwen's moving to the small village of Heddaby to become the local teacher and pick up the remnants of her life. Only... everybody's a little bit off in Heddaby. The church is in ruins, the townspeople will just stare off as if in trances all of a sudden, and what's the deal with those dolls anyway?
The Witches is the closest that Fontaine ever got to the "Hag Horror" trend that devoured all actresses who dared to grow old in public in the 60s and 70s - this was two years after Joan's older sister Olivia DeHavilland made Lady in a Cage and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, for example - but it really isn't "Hag Horror" at all, except for as far as the spectacle of watching an esteemed actress like Joan reel in horror from silly puppets goes. Joan maintains a sense of glamour, looking exceptionally well-crafted in her schoolteacher tweeds and shift-dresses...
... well okay she does get trampled by a bunch of sheep at one point. There is that. And the film does ultimately become explicitly about the pursuit of youth by those women who have lost it - Kay Walsh as the head of the coven gives what becomes a deliriously campy performance in the last act that must be seen, and then rewound and watched three more times, to be appreciated.
But the film, for all its cats in sacks and orgiastic dance routines, is actually kind of thoughtful on the subject of female subjugation - after the nefarious plot's been uncovered The Witches trades the typical fisticuffs that something like the more manly Wicker Man traffics in for a lengthy scene of... two older women chatting at length about their place in the world?
It's also for Hammer an astonishingly chaste film - there's not a hint of heaving cleavage on display. And the topic of Feminine Hysteria, which Joan's character is undermined by on several occasions, is knotted through the plot and tweaked in curious, forward-thinking ways. Could it be? Could The Witches actually kind of be a Feminist Picture? I think it could! Take that to your cage and mount it, Olivia.