“
The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.
”
”