Historical Accuracy
While some reviewers have praised the film for its ostensible "historical accuracy", others have strongly questioned its adherence to historical fact. Dr. Malcolm Gaskill, Fellow and former Director of Studies in history at Churchill College, Cambridge, and author of Witchfinders: A 17th-Century English Tragedy, critiqued the film for the Channel 4 History website, calling it "a travesty of historical truth." While acknowledging that "there is much to be said in favour of Witchfinder General–but as a film, not as history", based purely on its level of historical accuracy Gaskill gave the film "3 stars" on a scale of 0–10.
Gaskill had several complaints regarding the film's "distortions and flights of fancy". While Hopkins and his assistant John Stearne really did torture, try and hang John Lowes, the vicar of Brandeston, Gaskill notes that other than those basic facts the film's narrative is "almost completely fictitious." In the movie, the fictional character of Richard Marshall pursues Hopkins relentlessly to death, but in reality the "gentry, magistrates and clergy, who undermined his work in print and at law" were in pursuit of Hopkins throughout his (brief) murderous career, as he was never legally sanctioned to perform his witch hunting duties. And Hopkins wasn't axed to death, he "withered away from consumption at his Essex home in 1647". Vincent Price was 56 when he played Hopkins, but "the real Hopkins was in his 20s". According to Gaskill, one of the film's "most striking errors is its total omission of court cases: witches are simply tortured, then hanged from the nearest tree."
Read more about this topic: Witchfinder General (film)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or accuracy:
“We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)