Legend of the Witches

UPDATE: Now available in BluRay from the BFI. Excellent transfer, worth watching.

This was obviously made in an era when full frontal nudity in the cinema needed an excuse. "Now what can we use to get some pubics past the censor? I know! Witchcraft!", seems to be what the director thought.

A quick trip to Wardour Street to hire a camera, 50 quid for a roll of neg, and off to the local church for some background shots. "Let's make a movie (even if we can only afford black and white). Yippee!" Next off to Hampsted Heath with some cronies from the local pub (note to self: make sure the girls don't mind taking their knickers down; pity I forgot to tell the blokes not to try covering up their naughties as they all look like they are playing with themselves, when in fact they are trying to stop the camera seeing who is the "best man"!) I must say the rostrum camera-work isn't too bad and it's a pity that the database doesn't have the crew named.

The commentary sounds, and let's face it is, straight from the 1970's. You can imagine creeping into a dingy cinema full of the Dirty Mac brigade who are only sitting there to see the tits and bums.

From the above you will think that I am taking the urine, actually this film is quite interesting, well researched and deserves a play to a wider audience if only for the lack of coyness. But comments such as "The women's branch of the armed forces is a source of images" is well, rather odd to say the least! Although I can't imagine a real coven having so many long haired, firm breasted 20 year olds who all look like singer Mary Hopkin, accompanied by slightly balding 40 year old men trying to copulate with them. What happened to all the wizened, warty old hags? Perhaps they didn't go down the pub that night! In short, it's all a bit staged.

This 1970 movie is a dramatised documentary on the cult and practice of witchcraft since pre-Christian times in Britain. Featuring tales of Pagan gods and goddesses mingling with artful landscape shots, pictures of wildlife, Stonehenge and other images, narrated in typically 1970s droning voice over by Guy Standeven, it tries to sell itself as a serious investigation into witchcraft in the modern world, but is just an excuse for copious amounts of female nudity. The whole thing just comes across as a titillating exploitation flick (director Malcolm Leigh went on to make the British Sex film, Games that Lovers Play in 1971), and is a really slow paced film which is pretty boring despite its far out subject matter. It does however feature a pretty mesmerising soundtrack which changes intensity throughout the film, and is also notable for including the only known footage of Alex Sanders, dubbed the King of Wicca.

Halloween viewing and surprisingly effective it turned out to be. As excited children could be heard squealing on the streets outside this by contrast was a creepy and somber affair painting a most believable picture of witchcraft through the ages. There is much speculation about a 113 minute version but whilst there is no evidence to support this, the recent BFI Blu-ray set contains an 85 minute film which is considerably longer than the IMDb 70 minute quote and likely to be the full length. I imagine the shorter version is that which went briefly on general release because watching this I was amazed at the extent of the explicit nature of the content. I was also most impressed with the camera work throughout. From the misty sunrise opening and moon across the water to the naked rituals and more this was eye opening stuff indeed. Particularly pleased to see the Witchcraft museum in Boscastle featured as I remember my father donating much material there in his later years. Fabulous view and can't wait to watch the accompanying short and numerous extras.

I was excited to see that this film had been released on DVD by DD Home Entertainment, and delighted that their version was supposed to be 113 minutes (1hr 53 min) long. Like most people who have seen the movie at all I had only seen the 72 minute, cut-down, version of this film that was shown in theatres in 1970 and was broadcast on the UK Horror Channel in October 2004. I trawled the net trying to find more information on the length of the original release, to get some idea of what might be in this longer cut, but found nothing. So I spent my money and waited, anxious to see what the extra 40 minutes of footage contained, and keen to see the Special Feature Photo Gallery.

As my title suggests, the playing time of this DVD is not remotely close to 113 minutes, despite what the packaging says, it is 72 minutes! It is the same version as was shown on the UK Horror Channel, not a single frame more. To make matters worse, the Special Feature is the most pathetic I have ever seen on a DVD: eight poorly selected images from the film. These are not Stills (still photos taken at the time of filming, to be used for promotional purposes) but images that have been taken from the video itself: exactly what you would get by using your pause button.

The good news is that the image and sound are quite clear. This suggests that we may eventually get, from someone else, a decent release of this film, uncut and with a few interesting extras.

The later part of the 1960s was a watershed in terms of censorship.The power of the Lord Chamberlain to censor the stage was abolished.Shortly after that the all nude revue Oh Calcutta was staged.At about the same time there was a furore about the showing of a females pubic hair.The film was shown uncut at the NFT.The censor,John Trevelyan wanted to keep in step with public tastes,so full frontal nudity was allowed.So all of a sudden producers were allowed to show everything,though there were and still are things they couldn't show.So give the audience a large dose of education and you could put in a reasonable amount of nudity.So that is clearly what happened here.It is actually quite entertaining.I think that the sonorous narration was by Valentine Dyall.Somehow I doubt that this was ever shown in any of the major circuits cinemas.