Michael Reeves - Bigger Than Death
Over 40 years on from his untimely passing, interest in the British filmmaker and his small but compelling body of work has yet to dim.
Reading the reviews for John Logan’s Double Feature - currently enjoying a well-received run at London’s Hampstead Theatre - it’s not the the plays focus on movie legends like Alfred Hitchcock and Vincent Price that’s of interest but rather then fact that Logan’s four-hander so prominently features the late lamented wunderkind, Michael Reeves.
Very much a play of two halves, Double Feature starts out examining the fraught relationship that developed between Hitch (played by Ian McNiece) and Tippi Hedren (Joanna Vanderham) during the making of The Birds; a subject that’s been addressed at some length both in biographies and Julian Jarrold’s TV movie The Girl (2012).
But it’s when we move to East Anglia to witness the difficulties horror veteran Price (Barry Hardy) experiences while working with the twentysomething Reeves (Rowan Polonski) that business really picks up. Not because the matter hasn’t been picked over previously - it has - but because one half of the double-act is among the most enigmatic figures in the history of British film.
Ask about Michael Reeves and the two things most people will tell you are that he directed Witchfinder General and he died on the wrong side of thirty. What’s less commonly known is that Reeves made two features prior to his 1968 masterpiece, She Beast (1966) which was made using the takings from the producer’s hotdog cart, and The Sorcerers (1967) which is an incredibly assured affair given that Reeves was all of 24 when he wrote and directed it and he had the tricky task of coaxing a performance from a bona fide film legend in Boris Karloff.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to As Luck Would Have It to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.