Demons of the Mind (1972)

Director: Peter Sykes
Writer: Christopher Wicking, from a story by Christopher Wicking and Frank Godwin
Stars: Paul Jones, Patrick Magee, Gillian Hills, Robert Hardy, Michael Hordern and Yvonne Mitchell

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I wanted to see 1973’s Yellow Dog for Robert Hardy’s centennial but it’s stubbornly elusive and I couldn’t find a copy. Instead, I went with this kinda sorta Hammer horror from the year before. I hadn’t seen it before and he’s the lead character, however the order of credits reads, so it seemed like a good choice. However, now I understand why it’s not better known.

It worked best for me as a mood piece, a sort of impressionistic painting, because the film is as unhinged as its subject matter. We’re never quite sure of much that happens or why and, if I ever imagined that the ending would clear it all up, then I was horribly wrong. Half of me is eager to watch it again to discover what I had missed that would make sense of it all, but the other half is convinced that it wouldn’t help.

Initially, it’s all about Elizabeth. She’s in the back of a horse drawn carriage heading home to her family’s castle down a woodland path. It could easily be a Disney princess story but she clearly doesn’t want to be there and her older companion drugs her. Then she calms and we drift into either a memory or a dream. I’m not sure which, given that she spends it blissfully with a woodcutter but neither of them speaks.

When we reach the mansion, we meet her father, Baron Friedrich Zorn, and learn a few pertinent details. Her companion’s Aunt Hilda, the woodcutter was a young medical student and she’s been away at a sanitarium. Madness, it seems, is a family trait. The Baron’s wife was a suicide, maybe because of him, and he rages about evil in his blood. Incest is another family trait, Elizabeth and her brother Emil in lust for each other but being kept deliberately apart.

Meanwhile, in the village, a young blonde is murdered, her corpse drowned in rose petals and dragged off. We’ve seen enough Hammer horrors to assume these plot strands connect but it isn’t clear how yet and our only hopes at clarity are time and Dr. Falkenberg.

He’s on his way in another carriage and he’s bringing a young medical student with him. I wonder if you can guess who that is! You’d be right and his name is Carl Richter. They bicker in the carriage in a way that seems important, the young man pointing out that his elder has fallen from grace in Vienna. It’s suggested he’s a quack and Carl is the future, the one who will cure the Zorns, but that isn’t where we go.

At this point, you’d probably like to ask me where we go instead but that’s a tangled mess that raises a new question: is it a tangled mess because it wants to be? After all, the theme is insanity, initially applied to Elizabeth, then to Emil and the killer, eventually to almost every character, especially Hardy’s wide eyed Baron, and maybe even the people who made it.

It seems highly plausible that Christopher Wicking took the perspective of a madman for effect to make us ask if there’s any voice in the film to trust. I can see that. Or maybe it’s just a bad film with a bad story. I can see that too.

I called it a kinda sorta Hammer horror for it was made with Frank Godwin Productions. Godwin also co-wrote the story with Wicking, who adapted it into the screenplay. He clearly had a lot of say and that’s why this has little of the usual Hammer feel. In fact, a few Hammer tropes are actively subverted, Klaus a perfect example. He’s half brutal henchman and half mad scientist’s assistant but may well be the only sane human being in Zorn’s mansion.

Hammer stories weren’t always the deepest but they tended to flow well. This is disjointed and awkward, as if some scenes were shuffled deliberately to mess with the chronology, and others are contradictory, as if they’re triggers to make us wonder who’s trustworthy.

It’s all theatrical too. Robert Hardy, Yvonne Mitchell and Patrick Magee move around each other in one scene, emoting like they’re all on stage projecting to the audience. On stage, it would be powerful, all three seriously talented actors with nuance and range. On screen, it’s overdone, especially in soliloquy.

Michael Hordern is stuck in soliloquy, as a holy man of some description who wanders in from the woods believing himself sent by God. I’m not sure that he ever acknowledges he’s in a scene with anyone else. He certainly doesn’t act like it. All he sees is God and the fiery cross he uses to honour His gruesome wishes.

Hardy is a believable madman here and the madness radiates out from him to everyone in the cast. It’s up to us, I guess, to determine if it works or not. It’s a mess of a film but it may be a deliberate mess and it’s memorable.

Hardy was memorable for over sixty years, whether on stage, on television or in film, as a succession of priests, provosts and politicians (and royals), in a varied set of films from BBC TV movies to four Harry Potter features, as the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge.

Such roles may have felt natural as he was born into the establishment, his mother from landed gentry and his father a headmaster of Cheltenham College. He studied at Rugby and Oxford, where he was taught English by both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

He started out, almost predictably, on stage doing Shakespeare, opposite all the greats, and he continued that onto television, often in live plays. Most of his early screen work was on TV and he found a regular role as early as 1956 as the lead in a mini-series of David Copperfield.

He made Hollywood features, 1958’s Torpedo Run the first, but his films—The Spy who Came in from the Cold, 10 Rillington Place and Young Winston—came in between noted TV work.

After a four year run on The Troubleshooters in the late sixties, he played one of his deepest roles as Abwehr Sgt. Gratz in 1970’s Manhunt, a deeply unstable Nazi. In between seven series of All Creatures Great & Small, as the senior vet Siegfried Farnon, he found his signature role in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, these shows landing BAFTA nods and a CBE.

He played Churchill at least six times from the eighties to the teens, on screen alone, and FDR twice. He had all the gravitas for both and that led him to narration, his final work being posthumous on 2018’s Historic Hauntings.

Off screen (and sometimes on) he was also a historian, having fallen into mediaeval history while playing Henry V. He wrote two books on the longbow and a documentary on the Battle of Agincourt, which he also presented.

He died in 2017 at 91 as a still working actor.