A selection of approximately 120 images from The Avengers 50th Anniversary Celebration are now up on Flickr. These cover the Friday and Saturday 24th and 25th June. Included are images from the Friday night Laurie Johnson concert and the Saturday talks and panels, including Paul O'Grady's chat with Honor Blackman, Leonard White reunited with Honor and Julie Stevens and a writer's panel featuring Brian Clemens, Terrance Dicks, Richard Harris and Richard Bates. A second gallery covering the 26th June features directors Ray Austin, John Hough and Robert Fuest, Linda Thorson chatting to Cyd Child and Paul O'Grady and much more.

The Avengers celebrates its 50th in fine style at the University of Chichester this weekend and for my troubles I'm going to attempt to live blog some parts of it while I'm there. Hopefully, as well as providing a brief running commentary on a selection of the talks and interviews on each day I'll be able to integrate your Twitter comments, images and messages as I go (I hope).

It might go all horribly wrong, what with a potential lack of wifi and battery power, but I'm game to give it a go.

The Avengers 50th Anniversary Celebration
University of Chichester
25th to 26th June 2011

To access the live blog and to discover just a soupçon of what's happening this weekend...

"Hello, shoppers!"

Yes, that's the salutation from the Doctor that will greet you once you've been enticed into the dark recesses of BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who Experience currently occupying Kensington Olympia this summer. It's an impressively scaled interactive exhibition, offering a cornucopia of props, costumes and behind the scenes ephemera from over 40 years of the good Doctor's adventures and a prefect day out for Doctor Who fans young and old.

My journey on this half hour 'walk-through' experience was in the company of several fanboys and fangirls, all nervously lining up and waiting for the show to begin, unaware of what to expect. Surrounding us were the merest hints - a new series Silurian on guard and a rather fabulous tableau featuring one of Churchill's khaki Daleks - to the feast that would greet us once we'd been given a video pep talk by the Doctor himself.

As the Doctor's introduction concluded, advising us of the terrible threats to our safety that the crack in the universe would disgorge, the huge video screen we were watching thrillingly split open and our little party found itself in the National Museum aboard Starship UK. All the visual and aural details of The Beast Below surround you, highlighting each of the objects in the museum. It's at this point that the 'experience' cranks up and the walk-through proper begins with the Doctor interrupting the broadcast to advise us that he needs our help to free him from imprisonment in the 'spare' Pandorica his deadliest enemies had lying around (a cheeky bit of knowingness that's one of many instances where you'll detect Steven Moffat's hand in the general tomfoolery).

His plea for help concludes when the TARDIS materialises and, if you're a sad old bugger like me, it truly is a shiver down the spine moment when it appears and the Doctor invites us in through the front door. The police box doors lead into the lofty vaults of the current TARDIS interior, impressively re-mounted for the show. And what's even better, you get to navigate, run the diagnostics and take off and then land the old girl with the Doctor's help! Some nifty hydraulics under the floor make the journey a physically real event to his not-so-reluctant passengers too.

SPOILERS AHEAD

A welcome release for the second series of Moody and Pegg, Julia Jones and Donald Churchill's bittersweet comedy drama from 1975. We left the first series, broadcast in 1974, with Daphne Pegg and Roland Moody, our reluctant flat-sharers, having reached some kind of detente in their relationship after one of their occasional feuds. That initial series was a wonderfully played mixture of wistful romance and often quite anarchic farce, the entire appeal of the series generated by two brilliant central performances from Judy Cornwell and the late, great Derek Waring.

The second series, comprising of another six episodes, carries on in the same vein but adds some refreshingly new elements into the mix. We open with pretty much a restatement of first principles, both aesthetically and thematically, in Full House wherein Daphne is seen pacing about the flat in a stylish pale blue silk dressing gown and a huge pair of fluffy pink slippers (very popular slippers according to Cornwell in the interview on this set) as she waits to break the news to Roland that her Auntie Ethel, having rushed down from Bolton, has commandeered his bed.

This also provokes a reestablishment of the conditions agreed by them both about the mutual sharing of the flat. "You are in breach of our agreement," accuses Roland upon discovering his occupied bed. It transpires Auntie Ethel has provided Daphne with some company after Roland's temporary departure seen at the end of the first series. Daphne's sudden embrace of Roland, in her delight to see him back, and her defence of "I'd much rather have you Roland... er well, it is... er more natural... er... a woman is supposed to live with a man and n-n-not another woman" underlines what is, at heart, a very nostalgic and conventional view of the world in what were seen as progressive times for both sexes in the cultural and social upheaval of the period.

"laughter... grows out of subconscious anxieties"

Even though much is made of Daphne's employment and status with the civil service as somehow having more credit than Roland's unsettled position as self-employed antiques dealer, the relationship between her and Roland, despite being punctuated by a series of very bitter and often immature disputes, does suggest a return to more homespun if not romantic values in terms of desire and the post-war consensus.

As Garry Whannel notes in The Arts in the 1970s much of "popular television occupied a middle position" in securing a commonsense view of the public, political and social debates in which these programmes were made. "Commonsense is constantly trod and retrod" in a series such as Moody and Pegg, the characters and situations both nostalgic for a time when desire, class, masculinity and femininity seemed more straightforward as they cope with the deconstruction of deference and class and the rise of feminism and equality. Moody and Pegg is perhaps a less cruder form of the politicisation of gender that inhabits many of the half-hour sit-coms of the period where "laughter... grows out of subconscious anxieties."

Pointedly, it becomes evident that Daphne has drafted Roland in to rid herself of the interfering Auntie Ethel because, like all well-behaved middle class gentlemen, "he always knows the right thing to say" to the conspicuously working class, and rather blunter, Ethel (a scenery chewing, knitwear enhanced performance from the great Sheila Keith). However, this descends into the farcical, often a form employed for gender misunderstandings, as Ethel screams the place down when she sees a man in her room and takes on the role of affronted, hair-netted battleaxe. Naturally, it's Ethel who wins the occupancy of the room against the often effete Roland. He ends up with Daphne's bed after she capitulates with "take anything of mine, Roland!" with her innuendo suggesting those subconscious desires that power on throughout the rest of the series.

Keith treads a very fine line between overacting and suggesting Ethel's skills as emotional blackmailer as she reduces Roland and Daphne to tears with her bequeathing to Daphne of childhood mementos and a paean to lost youth and her rejection in old age. Look at the moment when she searches for the porcelain dish in her bag as she switches from weeping old age pensioner to calculating monster and that little smile in closeup as the scene ends with Roland asking Ethel to stay as long as she likes. Suffice it to say, they all end up drunk around the kitchen table.

The Full House of the title then lives up to its name as various waifs and strays turn up on the doorstep, including Roland's ex-wife, Gloria (Jo Rowbottom) and her boyfriend Len (Michael Robbins) on the run because he apparently couldn't pay his VAT. With Rowbottom and Robbins it shifts into prime sit-com territory rather than genteel philosophising about the on-off relationship between Roland and Daphne.

In some ways this seems perfectly natural as Robbins was already notable for his role in On the Buses and Rowbottom for various appearances in everything from Doctor Who, Z Cars, Please Sir! and that infamous high water mark of ITV sit-com gold, Romany Jones. Note also that Roland's perceived tasteful, middle-class aspirations contrast vividly against the rather vulgar and shrill lower-class, bad taste stereotypes of Gloria (sporting a leopard print fur coat) and Len (in check trousers and a retina-searing yellow shirt).

Best to persevere with this set as Full House is not the best example of what the series can achieve and the later episodes are a return to the form of the first series. Fortunately Roland pawns Auntie Ethel's knick-knacks and pays off Len and Gloria, returning us to the quiet romance of the flat-share, justifying his decision to Daphne as "I had to decide whether you wanted Len and Gloria and Auntie Ethel and a Chinese Tang saucer or whether you'd rather just have me and no... Chinese saucer. And I decided you'd rather just have me."

"I was a virgin... at 22. I was a very late developer"

Roland's Ladies is rather better and introduces the recurring character of Roland's daughter, Rowena, among the more farcical and slapstick elements. It's also the return of Iris (Adrienne Posta), one of Roland's former flames, as she sets about selling her hairdressing business. This is by turns a very bittersweet encounter between Roland and the daughter he never knew he had with a welcome exploration of Roland's past misdeeds in Hastings in 1955 and some very broad comedy as Iris ropes in Daphne, Roland, Roland's colleague Sid (Tony Selby also returning to the series) and another former love Monica Bakewell (Frances Bennett) to populate the salon and prove to her potential buyer that it's a very going concern.

There is some lovely interplay here in the back yard of Roland's antiques shop between Waring, showing Roland at his most vulnerable, and the elfin Lea Dregorn (later as Lea Brodie in Warlords of Atlantis) as the impulsive Rowena, decked out as 1970s hippy chick, utterly delighted to discover Roland is her dad. It's a quiet, nostalgic interlude, one that again underlines the rose-tinted attitudes to post-war and pre-Swinging times ("I was a virgin... at 22. I was a very late developer" offers Roland), before the high camp antics that take place in Iris's salon. The revelation of his daughter's existence also enables Roland to challenge Daphne's perception of him as a selfish man-about-town (his various women are described as "all bosom and no brains").

Again, Waring is wonderful as Roland when the enormity of a whole new chapter to his life is revealed to him and he confides the details of his relationship with Rowena's mother to Daphne over supper. This once again taps into the romantic, often confidential nature of the relationships at the heart of the series. However, it also ignites a crisis of confidence too, wth Roland worried that his daughter will only see him as "a dirty old man who gets drunk and chases tarty birds. I am of course but I don't want her to know that!"

It's at this juncture that Iris turns up and the episode flips into farce mode. The selling of her hairdressing salon turns into a series of disasters as customers, including Monica, end up with outrageous hairdos courtesy of Roland and Sid, dressed to camp perfection by neighbour Percy (who examines Sid's chest, as he unbuttons his shirt to achieve that silk shirt and medallion look, and declares, "Oh, it's a little stark, love" to which Sid retorts, "This is about as stark as I'm getting!"); Daphne destroys the nails of a successful 'hand' model; an escaped snake causes a riot (bit of an old cliche that one) and the shop's electrics combust.

It's a very amusing parade of Posta at her most self-consciously camp as Iris, of Daphne, Sid and Roland well out of their comfort zones, with plenty of slapstick and some terrific double entendres littering the script (as Roland puts a customer under a faulty hairdryer he declares "Iris, I can't turn her on" to which Iris responds, "There's a knob in the end, do it yourself!").

It's back to what the series does best with Daphne and Roland: At Home in which we find our erstwhile couple alone on a wet Sunday afternoon. Roland is at his lowest ebb as the antiques trade is proving to be very fickle during "the run on the pound" and he's broke and demoralised. This is, for the most part, a two-hander between Waring and Cornwell and you can see why their casting had such an impact on the series as a whole. Both are charming, witty, sensitive and extremely funny in this episode. It's probably the best of the second series as Roland succumbs to a vision of a penniless mid-life crisis (joining the many others he catalogues from the newspaper headlines - "Paul Getty sells 'is Reubens, Elizabeth Taylor pawns her diamonds, I Was A Teenage Bankrupt") and needs Daphne to bring some light back into his life.

For Daphne, things are looking up in the relationship department and she's been out to the ballet with a male colleague, Edward. Roland wants to hear all about it because, having not had any interest for months, he might "get a thrill on the rebound." Roland's fascination with this other man is part and parcel of the frantic discourses about masculinity that occupied many sit-coms of the 1970s. He feels that vicariously he can re-empower himself by listening to Daphne wax on about the "athletic" man whom she's about to go and watch play rugby, her female fantasy she wants to squeeze up against. As she describes Edward's virtues, she also notes that he's a little slow on the uptake and she wants to tread gently as she doesn't want him to think, as Roland so ripely puts it, "that you're dying for it!"

"As a man, what would turn you on?"

The episode builds on this notion with, initially, Roland attempting to essentialise his masculinity in relation to the unseen Edward and, later, by repeating this almost to the point of a physical relationship with Daphne. His depression and lack of self-confidence is exacerbated by the fact that it is also his birthday and that no one has remembered it, including the official receivers and bailiffs he's acquainted with. When she asks him what he'd like for his birthday, he mournfully requests a game of Russian roulette. "Will they have that in Selfridges?" she innocently enquires. Later, as she parades a new outfit in front of him and asks subtly if he thinks it shows off her figure well all he can say is "It doesn't give you a big arse, no."

She suggests he comes with her to the rugby but then realises that Roland's presence might incur Edward's male possessiveness. He feels even more unwanted and like many men feeling sorry for themselves turns on the emotional blackmail, declaring "I can't see any light anywhere. You go and enjoy yourself!" with his martyrdom to the fore. It's also interesting to see Daphne allowed to offer a female point of view on the world in contrast to Roland's disintegrating male subjectivity where, even if it is a highly romanticised take on male-female relationships, it is a precursor to the character's development in the last half of this series, and displays a woman capable of the sexual excitement she often represses and reveals again a rather coquettish, seductive side to Daphne.

However, the day out with Edward doesn't take place after he rings and puts her off and Daphne has to fall back on Roland's company for the afternoon. As Daphne herself begins a serious self-examination of her feminine appeal and worries that she's been too cheap in her friendship with Edward, Roland, now chirpier, finds solace in a Chinese takeaway. What transpires is an interesting exploration of role-playing and male/female fantasy as they both try and cheer each other up, their close physical contact momentarily reaching new heights when they agree to sleep together.

"As a man, what would turn you on?" asks Daphne of Roland, desperate to know where she has gone wrong and framing the episode's theme of rejection - by society itself (not for Daphne the hob-nobbing at Henley and not for Roland a successful business) and by other men and women (both of them without love). She now feels she's at a crisis, "past sex and that sort of thing", and suddenly finds herself joining Roland as one more mature person incapable of finding a lasting relationship. However, Roland selfishly borrows some money and decides to call Jane, an old girlfriend.

As they play Scrabble, Daphne then comes to understand that Jane is a "tart" and Roland is borrowing the gas money to spend on her. He sees it as a way of cheering himself up as he faces the "grey plateau of despair." Daphne simply sees him reduced to a man with "salacious appetites" driven by sex and money (and with impeccable timing Cornwell then pipes up and offers "is crumpet allowed?" as Daphne turns back to the game). Naturally, Roland can't help but reveal that Jane dresses up as a French maid with a feather duster and Daphne, quite appalled, asks, "What does she do? Dust the ceiling while you're messing about?" This is clearly not the kind of 'love' that interests Daphne and as we see later, her challenge to and interpretation of this fantasy, and of male fantasies in general, results in complete and hilarious disaster. You'll never see Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel or Howard Keel in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in quite the same light again.

Over onto Disc 2 for the final three episodes, opening with Daphne - The Primitive. This ushers in a loose trilogy of episodes and introduces the character of Jim (Denis Lill) who will be instrumental in the emotional journey that Daphne will eventually undertake. Daphne and Roland are preparing a cosy dinner for Rowena as a way of properly getting to know her. She is not convinced by Roland's attempts to set the ambience and his sudden ability to innately understand the younger generation. "How can you possibly know so much about a 19-year-old? Her views are probably quite different from yours," she declares.

Daphne's not only articulating the inevitable downside of what was then seen as the generation gap but she's also attempting to ensure her own modesty is protected in the fall out from what she calls "that wet Sunday". Naturally they argue about what exactly happened on that afternoon and Roland suggests that she shouldn't "pass moral judgements" on their behaviour. He sees it as a romantic, poetic episode, outside the sphere of moral strictures, whereas Daphne clings to her repression and is faintly ashamed by the memory of it.

The generational attitudes to love, men and marriage are best explored in an lovely little scene between Rowena and Daphne. Rowena is pretty forthright about what she wants from a man ("good in bed") which shocks Daphne a little who is not used to talking about sex in such bold terms. It's also here that we get an indication that Daphne doesn't want a conventional husband ("not a real husband... a sort of...") but would settle for what Rowena describes as a 'consort'.

As this was just before punk threw out its challenge to any remaining so-called traditions, Rowena's counter-cultural role is less about the resurgence of a disenfranchised generation reclaiming its working class roots and more representative of the last gasp of middle class teenagers who self-consciously styled themselves as 'anti-establishment'. Note how she dismisses what Roland sees as a symbol of being 'with it' in the David Bowie album ("it's a reissue, he did it three years ago") and finds more excitement in the nostalgia of The Inkspots. The shifting sands of this cross-generational appeal to nostalgia was very much a cultural trope of the mid-1970s.

When Rowena invites a male friend to the dinner, both Daphne and Roland misconstrue, as is typical in most farces, her actual motives. While they think she's seeking their approval of Jim as a potential husband, Rowena is actually trying to get Jim and Daphne together.  Unfortunately, Roland gets a teensy bit jealous of Daphne's ability to relate to Rowena and pompously lays down the law. Daphne takes great umbrage and decides that if Roland insists in making her conform to the stereotypical, distant housekeeper he wants her to be then that is the role she will play.

Pointedly, she criticises him for changing his mind ("you put on morals like you put on a new coat"), which Roland always seems to do, as he switches the dinner party from intimate get together to an interrogation of a future son-in-law. Roland then insists Daphne makes herself scarce, worried that her presence would undermine his own moral rectitude if he now has to meet Rowena's intended. As he hands her a fiver and tells her to go out for chop suey at the local Chinese, she sounds the call to arms in yet another battle of the sexes (and ages): "you hypocrite!" Listen out for Daphne's hysterical reaction from the kitchen when Jim deflates Roland's pomposity about his newly-acquired daughter.

The dinner is an uncomfortable and embarrassing disaster with all attendees at cross-purposes, making extremely nonsensical small-talk while Daphne storms about like a demented Hilda Ogden ("nuts for three!"). Jim also turns out to be a man living on his nerves, utterly clumsy outside of his comfort zone and bewildered as the dinner table turns out to be the front in Roland and Daphne's mutual and heavy bombardment of childish bitchiness. Even as Roland surrenders, the 'chutney incident' is lying in wait to scupper any last minute cease-fire and all bets are off as Daphne and the chutney finally come to blows.

It's a skin-crawlingly funny exploration of social etiquette that turns into a rip-roaring diatribe from Daphne as, disrobed from her chutney covered posh Italian dress and hurtling through the room in tears, she claims, "Oh, I never want to see another man as long as I live!" The concluding act is an hilarious one-up-manship contest between the two of them to completely wreck the flat and empty each other's belongings out into the street in an orgy of unreasonable self-destruction that reflects the finest traditions of screwball comedy and slapstick and offers Waring and Cornwell a chance to indulge in some physical comedy.

Cue much hilarity about blocked baths and opera recitals

Things have obviously taken a turn for the worse in The Plumber's Mate as it seems both flat-mates, no longer compatible to shared living, want to divide the place into separate and private areas à la Albert and Harold's own approach to the Berlin Wall in the Steptoe and Son episode, Divided We Stand. Before the wall goes up between man and woman, both psychologically and physically, Daphne and Roland attempt to find their own rooms.

Daphne has a close encounter with that other 1970s sit-com stereotype, the man-hating lesbian. Mrs. Frisby, (Susan Engel in over-the-top comic form) who provides a self determining retort of "Men!" to Daphne's critique of Roland, is all breathy lechery as she misunderstands Daphne's situation. "You seem to be the type of woman I'm looking for," she smoulders as Daphne tells her about her spinster existence. The possibility of her and Daphne having an "understanding" is dispelled by the arrival of Roland, also wanting to look at the room. The spectre of homosexuality disrupting the normality of the traditional man/woman/heterosexual relationship is banished as Daphne, rapidly sensing she's Mrs. Frisby's prey, leaps toward Roland for protection.
 
And so the flat is divided into two private areas, one for Moody and one for Pigg... er Pegg, as soon as Daphne's corrected the sign on the door. We also see the return of Jim who, rather than being put off by the cat-fight between his dinner hosts, has come calling with flowers for Daphne and literally crashes through the partition wall into her life. The episode then slowly shows their relationship developing. He turns out to be the heir to the Fullerton water-closet manufacturing business. When he looks over their plans to convert one of the rooms into another bathroom it is the beginning of a chain of events that sees the plumbing blocked in various flats in the building, including one belonging to opera singer Veronica Spicer (Abby Hadfield). Cue much hilarity about blocked baths and opera recitals. 

The final episode, The Proposal, opens in atypical style. We find Jim and Daphne now together in his flash London apartment. He asks her to marry him but she would rather he propose a 'union' instead of a conventional marriage. The stage is set for a get together of all their friends and acquaintances to celebrate their living together, with Daphne endorsed as Jim's 'mistress'. However, Jim's housekeeper Mrs. Stonebridge provides an ominous signal of what is to come when she confides in Daphne about Jim's previous wife.

Auntie Ethel is, naturally, outraged at this arrangement and wails on about Daphne's defying of tradition ("that nasty word.. union... it makes you sound like a couple of officials") and social etiquette. However, when she understands that Daphne is 'marrying' into money, she soon changes her tune. When Daphne explains that she agrees with Roland's view that "marriage is fast becoming obsolete", Ethel accuses Roland of taking money from Jim to make "my niece his concubine." Ethel eventually takes to her bed with a bad cold and refuses to come to the party Daphne has organised in the flat until Percy coaxes her out with a glass of champers. 

Roland, meanwhile, desperately needs a few grand to purchase the lease on new premises and has been searching for a new shop with Rowena. Again, he's down in the dumps because he can't afford anything, has had his notice to quit the current shop and will be out on the street in weeks. Roland's crisis of masculinity is again underlined as he frustratedly cries to both Daphne and Rowena, "I've got to live my life as my self, haven't I? I can't have women shoring me up. I'm a man for God's sake," as, in a rather undignified state, he soaks his sore feet in a bowl of water. "I'm in command of my own destiny. I'm not having a woman tell me what to do!" he puffs. Rowena then orders him to lift his foot out of the water and he complies as she pours more salt into it.

At Daphne's news, he gets rather crotchety and perhaps jealous that she has found someone with more money than he currently can get his hands on. However, after Roland pathetically grumbles about being left with the lone responsibility of the flat, Daphne angrily rounds on him and suggests that she will advertise to find someone to occupy the flat with him once she moves out. It's a very bittersweet scene as he capitulates to her and offers, "I've got no kind of hold over you. We met as strangers... now we part... as strangers." Which is, of course, not true because if there is one couple that know each other very intimately then it's Moody and Pegg.

Roland's fortunes momentarily perk up as an old flame, Stella Lonsdale, answers the advert for the flat. But it's a fleeting proposal and Stella decides the flat-share wouldn't work, leaving Roland back to square one. Daphne also faces her own insecurities head on too. She believes she's found the 'consort' she's looking for and, under her influence, Jim seems to have found security, despite his nervousness and clumsiness. And yet there's a feeling that this is all that he ever wanted and perhaps without that firm response to an actual proposal of marriage, he obviously finds the strength, gleaned from Daphne, to leave her and disappear to Brazil on a two-year archaeological dig. These themes all tap into the growing popularity of co-habitation and non-traditional forms of 'living together' in the mid-1970s as an alternative to marriage, themes that are right at the heart of the series format itself. The party we see later is in itself a further example of these arrangements as various guests turn out to be a chain of ex-lovers and partners.

Again, we see the swings in Roland and Daphne's mutual fortunes played out. As Daphne ascends so Roland descends and, typical of the narrative structure in Moody and Pegg, this eventually turns on its head. Therefore, as Daphne faces being dumped by Jim, an opportunity presents itself to Roland. After a get together with friends and neighbours, including the return of Monica, Iris, Percy and Veronica, Daphne is left humiliated by Jim's flight abroad and she quietly does a flit to the hotel they'd booked to be together at but, under the circumstances, to spend time on her own and consider her next move. What happens next is for you to find out but it brings the series, with its charming, appealing central performances from Waring and Cornwell, to an appropriately bittersweet end.

Special features
A lovely little interview, about 25 minutes long, with Judy Cornwell about how the series was written and produced, her relationship with fellow actors, especially the late Derek Waring and her subsequent career as a writer.

Moody And Pegg - The Complete Second Series
Thames Television Production 1975
Network DVD / Released 27 June 2011 / 7953540 / 300 mins approx / Region: 2 - PAL / Subtitles: None / Sound: Mono - English / Picture: 1.33:1 - Colour / Cert: 12

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) occupies what could be seen as the peak of the 'new Hollywood' film making of the 1970s. The storming of the Hollywood system, which by the mid-1960s was an ailing monolithic structure out of tune with the rapidly changing times it found itself in and where its forms of conventional representation had become exhausted, was achieved by a miscellaneous group of film directors, nurtured in the bosom of film schools, working in television or getting their break with independent producers like Roger Corman. This 'American New Wave' rose spectacularly into life with the likes of Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), spanned the early to mid 1970s and launched the careers of, amongst many, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, De Palma and Scorsese.

Ironically, it was the huge success of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) that demonstrated to the ailing studios there was money to be made in more high concept, populist films, a conservative cinema that eschewed the New Wave's dedication to artistic values, counter-cultural concerns with anti-establishment politics, identity, sexuality and violence. At the same time the corporations, understanding there was money to be made, bought up the major studios just as many of the movement's directors had been over-indulged to the extent that Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) financially ruined United Artists and Coppola's own American Zoetrope studio collapsed after the disaster of One From The Heart (1982)

... a questionable anti-hero

Scorsese's Taxi Driver seems to stand at the crossroads of this period. A very successful film that blends the auterism of old Hollywood, of Hitchcock particularly, with a European sensibility, culled from Bresson and Godard but that also aims for the crowd pleasingly sensational and violent while offering a questionable anti-hero in the charismatic central character of Travis Bickle. Bickle is clearly regarded as an alter-ego of director Scorsese, his screenwriter Paul Schrader and actor Robert De Niro if you follow the rationale of many of the discussions in this disc's special features and all of whom overtly acknowledge cinematic influences as part of the film's postmodernist style.

Thus Taxi Driver wanders, with a certain degree of intent, along the edge of European art-house influences and classic Hollywood of the 1950s. Scorsese quotes from Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962) Godard's Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (1967), nods to the psychological thriller conventions of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) and Vertigo (1958) (Herrmann's iconic score for Taxi Driver is in this idiom) and the iconoclasm of Orson Welles, particularly Citizen Kane.

Schrader's script references "God's Lonely Man," an essay by Thomas Wolfe, in which Wolfe connects the intense loneliness of his own life to this universal aspect of humanity (with Bickle directly quoting "Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man"), the confessional narrative of Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) and the quest narrative and tribal conflicts of John Ford's The Searchers (1956). He also acknowledges that the character of Travis Bickle was influenced by Dostoyevsky's exploration of alienation in and disgust of modern society using an unreliable narrator, Notes from Underground. The French Existentialist heroes of Camus's The Stranger and Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea are also cited as a direct link to Travis's relationship to the degradations he sees around him and that lead to violence.

The film opens with that now iconic image of the taxi sliding out of the clouds of steam, a symbolic beast emerging from the Underworld of New York city. After the titles, which seem to offer an hallucinogenic vision of the streets of the city from the point of view of the taxi's driver, we're introduced to Travis Bickle (De Niro), a Vietnam vet attending an interview to become a taxi driver. Immediately, the film becomes a point of view narration, the audience is seeing his world from inside out. This is indicated initially in that off-kilter camera move in the taxi company's garage where Travis leaves the screen and the camera follows his almost 360 degree viewpoint of this world before circling round to join Travis on the edge of the screen again, always on the edge of this world.

Later, Scorsese repeats the same move with Travis's taxi leaving the frame with another pan through the scene to rejoin it. Note the scene where Travis is on the phone and the camera slowly tracks away from him into an empty corridor which seems to visually symbolise the character's isolation. It's in the scene at the garage that the internal monologue that structures the film begins and we see Travis writing a diary and also revealing to us his innermost thoughts and feelings about a city that he feels is sliding into an apocalyptic vision of Hell. Unable to sleep at night and taking pills to stay awake, drinking heavily, we observe with him what a typical day might be for Travis and the kind of passengers he picks up as he drives his taxi around the city. As he does so we get a sense from him in his voice over that he strives to be more normal and to fit in with the rest of society.

... downward plunge into moral confusion

A symbol of that path towards normalisation is Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) who he begins to stalk after spotting her working at the Palantine presidential campaign headquarters in the city. After a long period of observing her and her colleague Tom (Albert Brooks), he summons up the courage to ask her out and after taking her for coffee they agree to go to a movie together. Meanwhile, Travis actually encounters the politician, Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris), she's campaigning for when he picks him up in his taxi. Their conversation, which begins with Travis eagerly offering the candidate his support spirals off into a rant from Travis about ridding the city of the scum filled streets.

To further symbolise Travis's downward plunge into moral confusion, he meets a young prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster) who tries to escape from her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) in the taxi but is pulled out of the back seat before Travis can drive away. It's an encounter that then sets up a major sub-plot in the film and where Travis becomes obsessed with rescuing Iris from her pimp. He later picks up a passenger (a cameo from Scorsese) who demands that Travis pull over to his house so that he can observe his own wife conducting an affair, ranting on about how he will eventually shoot her.

Meanwhile the date with Betsy goes horribly wrong. He takes her to see a porn movie on Times Square and when she understands what kind of film it is, outraged and disgusted, she leaves. Travis is devastated by this rejection and the accumulation of all these incidents start to push him over the edge. Worried, he tries to talk to his taxi driver colleagues and turns to one of them, Wizard (Peter Boyle) for help, but pointedly Wizard can only offer that the job will become him and it seems he will lose his individuality and becomes lonelier and lonelier as a result. As a character, Travis becomes a moral contradiction, typical of the anti-hero, where he tests our loyalties to him, in empathising with a lonely, damaged man, and then distances us as he becomes a hysterical, delusional creature who believes that violent actions will transform him into a hero.

Travis sets out on a crusade. He buys guns and begins to train himself. He starts to stalk Palantine, obsessively watching him on television and attending his political rallies. He intends to assassinate him. At the same time, he starts to search for Iris. The climax of the film shows both the attempted assassination and a violent, bloody shooting as Travis kills Iris's pimp. He attempts to shoot himself in the head but ironically he finds he's run out of bullets. In the film's final sequence, we see him put his finger to his head and imitate this action as the police arrive at the scene. The coda to the film depicts Travis as a vigilante hero but one who is still enmeshed within a fantasy of his own making.

The film becomes an essay about Travis's notion of fate and predestination, fighting what he sees as his destiny to remain a taxi-driver, as 'God's lonely man'. Bickle's failure to connect to life in the post-Vietnam Western city, either by reaching out to his fellow cab drivers or attempting to find some common ground with politicians ("we are the people" is Palantine's collectivist slogan) is seen as symptomatic of male crisis where, as Angela K Smith notes in Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century, "masculinity as a value system has collapsed within Vietnam and now, after the war, has failed to offer Bickle a form of male collectivity that can rescue him from despair."

Travis Bickle's own sense of revulsion at the city as an "open sewer" and anxieties about sex is projected through his attitudes towards black people, pimps, prostitutes and the other communities that live on the fringes of society. He wants a collective effort the clean up the mess, directed by the president himself. Unfortunately Bickle decides to take this responsibility upon himself when his peers offer passive philosophy and the politicians turn out to be ineffective. This responsibility becomes a glorification in guns and violence that Vincent LoBrutto in Martin Scorsese: A Biography sees as an effect of the depression that closed the 1960s where "the intensity of physical abuse brought on by drugs and selfish, not communal, pleasures left most young American white males with little to believe in."

Interestingly, the film also reflects many of the political crises in New York of the time. The city had filed for bankruptcy in 1974 and the summer of 1975 saw a refuse collectors strike that left the city streets filled with rotting garbage. The city streets literally were filled with filth, not just as the consequences of the strike, but also reflected in the completely different function of Times Square. A far cry from the bright lights of today, in the 1970s it was a plethora of prostitutes and peep shows. Jimmy Carter's own vow to clean up New York and ensure that the city never had to endure another financial crisis mirrors Palantine's own role in the film.

Travis's attempted assassination also echoes Arthur Bremer's plan to assassinate Governor George Wallace. The film remarkably matches his attempt and Bremer, a lonely figure, also kept a diary and was also strongly motivated by a failed relationship. Taxi Driver itself supposedly influenced John Hinckley, who allegedly became obsessed with the film and with Jodie Foster. He stalked Foster and decided that he would best get her attention by killing the president, with two separate attempts on Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Scorsese crafted a compulsively watchable film through a combination of the central performance from De Niro, his skewed, often disorientating camerawork (a series of overhead shots seem to imply a 'god's eye' distanced view of places and events in the film) and editing (jump cuts tend to repeat many of Travis's scenes where is is 'talking' to himself to suggest the man's disintegrating mental state) and the use of Herrmann's quixotic, schizophrenic score that is both beautifully lyrical, almost melancholic, and dissonant, recalling his scores for Psycho (1960) and Vertigo. It's a film now regarded as a milestone of the new American cinema of the mid-1970s.

About the transfer
Quite stunning. Superb contrast and appropriate film grain adds a thicker, bolder quality to the transfer and the colour palette is beautifully rendered too, with reds and yellows really invigorated in high-definition but not dominating. Detail is also impressive on faces, objects and clothing. If you haven't got this film in any form then this is the best place to start as this does Michael Chapman's cinematography all the credit it so richly deserves. One of the best excuses to upgrade to that blu-ray player you've been coveting.

Special Features
Interactive Script to Screen: You can read the Paul Schrader script on screen as the film plays.
Original 1986 Audio Commentary:  This is a montage of separately recorded tracks, edited together for the original  Criterion Laser Disc release, from director Scorsese and writer Schrader that examines the script development and writing process, the film's ideas and themes and the director's own visual style, shooting on location in New York, design and casting and his editing techniques. Well worth a listen.
Robert Kolker Audio Commentary: A really detailed and stimulating commentary from Kolker, a Professor at University of Virginia. Kolker meticulously unpicks the film's visual language, the scripts themes, the colour palette and photographic styles, shooting angles and the relationships and repetitions in the symbolism of the film. Brilliant.
Paul Schrader Audio Commentary: An absorbing if intermittent track from Paul Schrader who is pretty honest about what he sees as the problems with his script as he discusses its gestation and production, the relationship between performance and the written word and how good actors can redefine a script.
Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver (HD, 16:52): A thoughtful piece to camera from Scorsese on the genesis of the film and how it reflects, along with the critical casting of De Niro, the 'outsider' figure on the periphery of society that is the major theme of Schrader's script. He also discusses his own film school origins and the influence of European cinema on his own vision. His passion for film still leaps off the screen.
Producing Taxi Driver (HD, 9:53): Again, another brief essay and this time we hear from producer Michael Phillips. Here he details how he ended up producing the film and why the ideas and themes were attractive to him. Some good detail about how the Hollywood studios were changing and younger directors were beginning to influence the kind of films being made by the majors in the mid-1970s.
God's Lonely Man (HD, 21:42): A brief but fascinating look at the psychological roots of the Travis Bickle character and how Schrader's own self-examination led to his creation.
Influence and Appreciation: A Martin Scorsese Tribute (HD, 18:30): Traces the roots of Scorsese's career, through film school and the alumni he emerged with, working with Roger Corman and directing his early films Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Mean Streets. With input from Roger Corman, Robert De Niro, Robert Kolker, Oliver Stone and Paul Schrader.
Taxi Driver Stories (HD, 22:23): Cab drivers tell some hair raising stories about operating in New York City in the 1970s plus some background into how they became drivers and how the New York Mayors and Taxi Cab Association ensure that the yellow cab remains visible as the city's ambassador.
Making Taxi Driver (SD, 1:10:55): Originally part of the DVD release in 1999 (that seems such a long time ago now) this does cover a lot of the material in the new HD featurettes but if you want to find one place that covers everything about the film and the director then this is a very good place to start.
Travis's New York (HD, 6:16): What was New York like in the 1970s? The film's cinematographer Michael Chapman chats with former New York Mayor Ed Koch.
Travis' New York Locations (HD, 4:49): A selection of clips from the film, depicting New York from 1975, shown in split-screen comparison with the locations as they were in 2007.
Intro to Storyboards by Martin Scorsese (HD, 4:32): Scorsese discusses the essential uses of the storyboard.
Storyboard to Film Comparison (HD, 8:21): Storyboard to screen comparisons.
Galleries (HD, 9:28): A vast array of material that covers the film's making, the location filming, publicity materials and even the recording of the classic Herrmann score.
Taxi Driver Theatrical Trailer (480p, 2:09).
MovieIQ.

Taxi Driver
Columbia Pictures Corporation / Bill-Phillips / Italo-Judeo Productions 1976
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment / Released 6 June 2011 / Region Free / BD 50 Dual Layer / 1080p - MPEG-4 AVC / Ratio: 1.85:1 / Colour / English, German (Germany) and French (Parisian) 5.1 DTS-HD MA / Subtitles: English*, English HOH, Arabic, Danish, Dutch*, Finnish, French (Parisian)*, German*, Hindi, Norwegian, Swedish, Turkish (*also on extras) / Cert: 18

Just a quick mention to readers and followers of Cathode Ray Tube's Doctor Who reviews that yours truly can be heard in conversation with Chip Sudderth and fellow writers and critics Kyle Anderson (nerdist.com and battleshippretention.com) and Teresa Jusino (Tor.com and Newsarama) on Chip's Two-Minute Time Lord podcast this week.

Our roundtable discussion looks at Doctor Who Series 6 (so far) and examines the changes brought to the show since Series 5, Moffat's women characters such as Amy and River and the how the latest episodes have been received by audiences in the UK and US.

It was a delight to take part in, to meet my fellow roundtable pundits and I hope you enjoy listening.

And don't forget... if you like the reviews here then my book on Series 5, The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor is still available either direct from the publisher or via Amazon and other retailers.

Michael Reeves was one of those few British directors whose potential was tragically cut short just as he was gaining a reputation in Europe as horror cinema's wunderkind. Witchfinder General (1968), now available in a digitally remastered special edition Blu-ray from Odeon Entertainment, remains a landmark British movie and his lasting legacy.

In horror cinema it marks the sea change from the Gothic fairytale of Hammer to the more realistic horror of Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), as well as tracing a direct line through to Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Russell's The Devils (1971) and the films of Pete Walker. It appeared just as cinema censorship was on the brink of relaxing, taboos were being broken and offered a new direction for British horror cinema, one that didn't rely on period 19th Century supernatural and mythological elements to generate a sense of unease. In fact, to include it as a film within the horror genre is actually misleading because it is more a period piece about the nature of patriarchal power and religious hypocrisy.

It was made by our old friends Tigon, a production company founded by Tony Tenser in 1967. Tenser emerged from the world of British exploitation films, as a partner with Michael Klinger in Compton Films, a distribution company that began by importing sex and horror films and then expanded to make its own productions. Klinger later persuaded Tenser to back Repulsion (1965), an intense study of psychological breakdown and Roman Polanski's English-language debut. By 1967, they had split and Tenser had set up Tigon as a production company. It was Tenser who first saw the unpublished galley of Ronald Bassett's original novel of Witchfinder General in 1966.

Liking the title, he immediately secured the rights and sent the novel to Michael Reeves, a young director who had cut his teeth as assistant director on Jack Cardiff's The Long Ships (1964) and first got his break into the business by turning up on Don Siegel's doorstep looking for work. Reeves had also stepped in as an uncredited assistant director on Italian horror Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a cheap European production starring horror icon Christopher Lee and a young Donald Sutherland, when its original co-director Warren Kiefer (or Lorenzo Sabatini to give him his original name) fell ill.

Reeves, charged with shooting second unit, contributed some stylish sequences to the film. Producer Paul Maslansky, impressed with his work, offered him Revenge of the Blood Beast (AKA The She-Beast - 1966) a low budget potboiler featuring Barbara Steele (whom Maslansky had persuaded to do a cameo for next to nothing in three days flat) that he managed to elevate beyond its rather mundane origins and non-existent budget.

Back in London, Reeves co-scripted with his friend Tom Baker (no, not that one) an adaptation of John Burke's The Sorcerers (1967). Here, he directed the legendary Boris Karloff in a rather psychedelic thriller about an old couple who get their thrills by living vicariously through a brainwashed young man played by Ian Ogilvy (a long-term friend of Reeves). Again, Reeves turned a low budget thriller into a stylish, contemporary film and Tenser recognised that Reeves, and his writing associate Baker, would be the men to transform a slice of popular history about the real witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, into something more suitable for Tigon. Tenser earmarked a £100, 000 budget and a proviso that filming should begin in September of 1967 to ensure they had decent weather for what, in Baker's words, was a film where they wanted a lot of "movement across the landscape and across the country to be a strong theme."

Reeves and Baker took a number of elements and characters from Bassett's book and then fashioned a screenplay which, in its original form, was far more violent than the one that was originally filmed and according to Benjamin Halligan, in his book Michael Reeves, was "near-unfilmable by 1967 standards" but contained a terrifyingly cynical view of a "savage, animalistic and brutal world" that Reeves manages to inject into the final film. Both were conscious that the film needed to satisfy the requirements for exploitative horror, to bring in the Hammer audience as per Tenser's objective, but marry it with the historical and biographical elements about Hopkins in Bassett's book and an English Civil War pastoral western that borrows its context, as Andy Richards suggests in The DVD Stack, from the revenge westerns of Budd Boetticher. Halligan observes that all these disparate components create "a tension at the heart of the film."

Reeves and Baker originally wanted Donald Pleasance for the central role of Hopkins, agreeing he would be perfect casting because of the actor's penchant for experimentation in performance. However, a co-funding and distribution deal secured with American International Pictures, fresh from its foray into Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and a bevvy of hippy/psychedelia exploitation films like The Trip (1967), foisted upon them AIP's horror star-on-contract, Vincent Price.

Reeves was not altogether happy with this casting and much of the script had to be revised accordingly which was probably for the best as the BBFC were already getting very hot under the collar about the script which they had already rejected as "a study in sadism in which every detail of cruelty and suffering is lovingly dwelt on." Reeves and Baker's revisions would substantially tone down these aspects but the film would still end up cut by about four minutes by the BBFC for its “excesses of sadistic brutality.”

Meanwhile, the film went into production on a final budget of £83, 000 in September 1967 and some exteriors were shot in Norfolk and Suffolk and the Dunwich coast, in Black Park and Langley Park and the interior sets were filmed mainly in converted aircraft hangers in Bury St. Edmunds. The arrival of Price precipitated frequent clashes between the young director and ageing actor as Reeves desperately tried to reign in what he saw as Price's often florrid and camp performing style. The film was constantly short of equipment and extras and was briefly hit by a British technicians union strike. To cap it all, AIP producer Louis M Heywood insisted on the insertion of some brief nude scenes for the export version of the film, scenes he took great pleasure in 'supervising' on his brief visit to the set in Lavenham and which Tenser directed simply because Reeves refused to do so.

Equally praised (David Pirie regards it as “…one of the most personal and mature statements in the history of British cinema") and vilified (Alan Bennett called the work "the most persistently sadistic and rotten film I've ever seen"), the film fictionalises the exploits of Matthew Hopkins, a prolific, real-life "witch hunter," during the English Civil War. The Civil War setting is an interesting one when seen in context with the late 1960s. Upheavals in society and culture were reaching their height in the year the film was released and the period was something of a watershed in which youth culture completely rejected the idea of post-war deference to their elders at the same time attitudes relaxed about drugs and sex, abortion and homosexuality. It was a revolution that also found its way into political movements such as feminism and the anti-war movements.

The politcial vacuum depicted in the film's Civil War framework could be seen as representative of a time when the fissures between generations and contradictions in political, religious and social attitudes created a sense of displacement within society, a violent alienation emanating from "the monstrously repressive actions of certain male characters", as Peter Hutchings noted in Hammer and Beyond, that is projected violently onto its weakest citizens, the old and, particularly, female.

The opening of the film also provides one of the major motifs that we'll see throughout Witchfinder General. A woman is dragged by a crowd through rolling countryside, the image framed by verdant hillsides and trees, and led by a minister to a freshly prepared gallows. Reeves contrasts the serenity of the natural landscape, the untainted English Arcadia, with a brutal act as the camera unflinchingly observes her public hanging. As the hangman kicks away the stool upon which she stands and her body swings out across the frame, in a scene that still packs a punch even today, the tone of Witchfinder General is bluntly established.

After the stark opening titles, a narration tells us that it is 1645 and that it is a period of unrest and England is in turmoil, with lawlessness abounding as a result of the Civil War between the Royalist Party of King Charles and the Roundhead Troopers in General Cromwell's Parliamentary Party. Reeves reinforces his motif again, the tranquility of the woodland is placed in stark contrast to the ambush that awaits Trooper Richard Marshall (a terrific Ian Ogilvy) and his men. There is a brilliant sequence here where Marshall waits with the horses as the rest of the men and his commanding officer deal with the rebels who ambushed them. Reeves holds Ogilvy in close up, his eyes darting across the woodland as he hears distant sounds of gunfire and fighting, cutting from him and to the eerily empty woods to emphasise how isolated and vulnerable he is. It's unlikely the production could afford a fully-fledged battle and this was Reeves striking solution.

For saving his commander's life, Marshall is granted leave and he returns to the village of Brandeston, reunited with his sweetheart Sarah Lowes (Hilary Dwyer) and her priest father, John Lowes (Rupert Davies). Here, Reeves contrasts the lushly romantic love scene, one which Dwyer was incredibly nervous about and reluctant to do even though Reeves handles it very tastefully, and its expression of sexual freedom with the repressive and violent attitude towards women dished out by the psychotic patriarchal figures of Hopkins and his henchman John Stearne (Robert Russell).

When Hopkins arrives in Brandeston, he tortures John Lowes and sexually blackmails Sarah into believing that if she gives herself to him he will show mercy to her father. Again, Lowes arrest and torture are pre-empted by an idyllic scene showing Sarah walking by the river, John Coquillon's hazy cinematography offering a lush, golden, almost heavenly vision in stark contrast to the brutality of Stearne's torture of Lowes.

Marshall learns of Lowes death (he is ducked in water to prove his sorcery and then hung for his troubles) and goes absent without leave to find Sarah, in distress, in her father's vandalised church. The corrupt authority figure that Hopkins represents, one that would hypocritically seek to curb sexual permissiveness and non-Christian belief systems, is put on report by Marshall, who swears a vow to God that he and Sarah be 'married' and that he will seek revenge for her desecration and the murder of her father by Hopkins. Thus a specifically male conflict between the young officer and the older Hopkins is established as the film's major force, as the vengeful liberation of youth is positioned against the cynical and mechanical patriarchy of Hopkins. The death of Lowes is the male exception to the parade of violence inflicted on women in the film. As Emily Edwards offers in Metaphysical Media: the Occult Experience in Popular Culture, the film does not contextualise these victims with an ability to use 'magic' but merely shows them as "victims of licentious greed, misogyny and sadism."

Marshall's desire for revenge is then depicted within a 'race against time' scenario as he tracks Hopkins and Stearne from village to village. His impulse is shown in a number of lyrical sequences as he rides his horse across the English countryside. At first he is in harmony with it, underlined by Paul Ferris's score redolent of the English standard 'Greensleeves', and his own sense of youthful liberation is matched by the overpowering sweep of the Norfolk landscape. Gradually, Marshall's obsession diminishes his relationship to the natural world just as Hopkins too is placed not within but outside of nature, as an aberation. His search takes him to Lavenham and a brief reunion with Sarah before both are incarcerated in Lavenham Castle.

It's here that the film achieves its bleak and despairing coda. Peter Hutchings, in Hammer and Beyond, sees the relationship between landscape, nature and the articulation of despair in the film reach its apotheosis with the final torture of Sarah and Marshall's axing to death of Hopkins. Marshall has by now become as obsessive as Hopkins and as cynically violent, psychotically desperate when the troops rescuing them shoot Hopkins dead before Marshall can finish him off. Sarah's final scream, as the objectified cause of all this trauma, "is a scream arising from a vividly portrayed male violence, a violence that seeks to preserve a certain masculine stability and power."

It was, and remains, a very powerful film. Reeves manages to get a very stripped down, intense performance from Price, probably one of the best he's ever given and that's something even he agreed with the director about after he'd seen the film and wrote a heartfelt letter praising the director despite their various differences. Price is well supported by Ogilvy, full of grit and determination as Marshall and spiralling into violent madness by the film's harrowing conclusion. Hilary Dwyer as Sarah, imbues a sensitivity in this poor woman's manipulation and repression at the hands of male power.

Throughout a very male-centred film there are also various cameos, one from Wilfrid Brambell as a feckless peasant, capable only of playing the 17th Century variant of Albert Steptoe it seems, and the sublime Patrick Wymark, as Cromwell. He, holding court at his encampment before the decisive Battle of Naseby, is another male figure that Hutchings sees as England's "new symbolic father" and a reflection of Hopkins own authoritarianism in England's not so green and pleasant land where social order is on the brink of descending into disturbing chaos.

There is some stunning imagery here - beautifully composed landscapes, driving tracking shots of riders and their horses dashing across vast stretches of countryside  - evoking a deep seated appreciation of an English Arcadia that's used as a backdrop to examine the nature of war, revenge, evil as a contagion that plagues the land. Cinematographer John Coquillon's work here is a revelation and, unsurprisingly, he went on to photograph a number of iconoclast director Sam Peckinpah's films, including Cross of Iron with its own take on male authoritarianism. Equally triumphant is the score by Paul Ferris. How a score as beautiful as this could be removed from the US VHS version and replaced with a synthesiser based score is beyond me. It's been rightly returned to its deserved place in the film and offers its own musical flavouring to this essay about England undergoing momentous, and often corrupt, change.

Way ahead of its time in 1968, the bleakness of its brutal, grim message comments much on the times it was made in, a year of generational clashes, moral argument, social disintegration and a come down from the hedonism of the mid-1960s. The moral ambiguity and the very realistic approach to violence that the film raises was probably the first time that a British 'horror' film took this route. It may be a period film but the issues it was dealing with were, and still are, utterly contemporary.

Perhaps the last word should go to Reeves himself. Alan Bennett declared of the film, in The Listener eight days after the film's release, that "it was a degrading experience by which I mean it made me feel dirty." In a letter Reeves responded, "Violence is horrible, degrading and sordid. Insofar as one is going to show it on the screen at all, it should be presented as such - and the more people it shocks into sickened recognition of these facts the better. I wish I could have witnessed Mr. Bennett frantically attempting to wash away the 'dirty' feeling my film gave him. It would have been proof of the fact that Witchfinder General works as intended."

Tragically, Reeves never got the opportunity to make his audience feel 'dirty' about themselves again. At the age of 25, he was dead from a drug overdose a mere nine months after the film's release.

About the transfer
Witchfinder General has had a chequered history on VHS and DVD. Numerous versions have been doing the rounds. In the UK, I think Redemption released an uncut version on VHS, restoring the cut sequences from a laser disc version and then Prism, later Optimum, released a 'Director's Cut' on DVD along with a European version in the same DVD set which included shots of topless tavern wenches at the behest of 'producer' Louis Heyward. However, their restoration of the cut sequences used what looked like inserts from a VHS version. This was a shame as the actual print they were inserting these into wasn't bad at all. Finally, in September 2007, Fox put out a completely restored version in their Midnite Movies range on Region 1 DVD. This was the definitive version as all the gore and violence, originally cut by the BBFC, had been properly returned to the film and the nudity, not intended for the UK and US markets, was left out.

That 2007 restoration is the one used here for the high definition transfer. It isn't the cleanest print, with the film often showing scratches and blobs of dirt. The quality suffers a little during dissolves and transitions, produing a softer picture very momentarily as a scene switches. However, the vibrant colour of that print greatly benefits from this transfer as does the detail. In some sequences it really is very robust in both the presentation of hue and the finer details of faces, uniforms and particularly the landscape. The wooded landscapes really come alive in this transfer and John Coquillon's ravishing cinematography benefits greatly from some astonishing depth. Well worth the upgrade in my opinion.

Special features
Audio Commentary (BD exclusive) with Michael Reeves's biographer Benjamin Halligan and director Michael Armstrong. Halligan's book on Reeves is an absolute must if you haven't read it and much as he tries to analyse the film here, Armstrong, director of the controversial, and Witchfinder inspired, Mark of the Devil (1970) and a friend of Reeves, would rather spend the time speculating about his friend's state of mind and Reeves's treatment of the subject matter. I think I'd have rather had Halligan do a solo commentary even though this two hander is an interesting effort. I suggest that if you have the Fox Midnite Movies edition that you hang on to it. It has, in my opinion, a more balanced commentary from the film's producer Philip Waddilove, actor Ian Ogilvy and writer Steve Haberman. It's full of lively and amusing anecdotes and behind the scenes stories and is worth listening to.
The Blood Beast: The Films of Michael Reeves (24 Mins)
An edition of Channel 4's Eurotika series from 1999. This was originally on the Prism/Optimum Region 2 edition, badly edited if I recall, and essentially covers Reeves's career with plenty of interviews, including Maslansky, Ogilvy, Waddilove and Hilary Dwyer.
Bloody Crimes: Witchcraft and Matthew Hopkins (24 Mins  - BD exclusive)
Not entirely sure where Odeon sourced this (*now reliably informed that this was one of a series produced by Anglia Television in 2002) but it's an interesting, if rather salacious, romp through the history of witchcraft and the real Hopkins's crimes.
Vincent Price on Aspel & Company (10 Mins - BD exclusive)
Cropped into 16x9 this selection from Aspel's 1980s pink and pastel chat show features a brief interview with Price and, although there is no mention of Witchfinder and Aspel's questions are thoroughly anodyne, Price comes across as an absolute charmer despite looking bored to death.
Intrusion: Michael Reeves short film with optional commentary from Halligan and Armstrong. (Never before commercially released)
Alternate Scenes from the Export Version (BD exclusive)
The notorious Louis Heyward 'produced' sequences, featuring the 'tits out' versions of the tavern scenes, quite frankly make the film look like Carry On... Witchfinder General. Awful.
Theatrical Trailer and Stills Gallery
Alternate US Opening and closing Credits (BD exclusive)
Cheapskates AIP, believing they could only earn their money back by turning Reeves's film into one of their Poe adaptations, concocted this set of titles with Price narrating Poe's The Conqueror Worm (the film's alternate US title) which has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself.

Witchfinder General
Tigon / American International Pictures 1968
Odeon Entertainment / ODNBF001 / Blu-ray / Released 13 June 2011 / Approximate running time: 87 minutes / Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen / 1080p / Rating: 18 / Sound: Dolby Digital Mono English / Region Free