The director Michael Reeves, who died from a drug overdose in 1969 at the age of 25, is today probably best known for his last film, "Witchfinder-General", made in 1968. "The Sorcerers" dates from the previous year and is an attempt to combine a horror theme with the sort of "swinging London" milieu familiar from other films of this period such as John Schlesinger's "Darling" or Antonioni's "Blow-Up". Professor Marcus Montserrat was at one time a distinguished medical hypnotist, but was disgraced in some scandal, the exact nature of which we never discover, some thirty years earlier, and is now a lonely, embittered and impoverished old man. He has, however, continued with his scientific work and has perfected a hypnotic technique which will enable him not only to control the subject by, as it were, remote control but also to experience vicariously all the sensations that the subject is experiencing. Montserrat and his wife Estelle persuade a young man named Mike Roscoe to volunteer to act as their guinea-pig for their experiments with this technique.
It is significant that this film was made by a director in his early twenties during a period when the "generation gap" was a phrase on everyone's lips, because this is very much a film about crabbed age and youth. The contrasts between the old and the young are emphasised. Montserrat seems more like Mike's grandfather than his father; Boris Karloff was fifty-six years older than Ian Ogilvy. (Ogilvy was a close friend of the director and was also to star in "Witchfinder-General"). Mike lives in an airy, spacious apartment, decorated in a then-fashionable style, and spends his leisure time in discos, night-clubs and coffee bars. (Some of the pop music of the era, such as Cliff Richard's "Out in the Country", is incorporated into the soundtrack). Montserrat and Estelle, by contrast, live in a dingy flat of the sort familiar from the kitchen-sink realist films of the fifties. Their floral wallpaper is faded and their furniture shabby and outdated. They appear to have no leisure pursuits except perhaps those of regretting their lost youth and envying the young.
The film is not, however, preaching some simplistic message along the lines of "Don't trust anyone over thirty" (a popular phrase at the time). Mike is not portrayed simply as an innocent victim; he is a bored, selfish and amoral young man who neglects his pretty French girlfriend Nicole. He volunteers for Montserrat's experiments because he is bored with his seemingly comfortable life and hungry for new experiences; there is a suggestion that, at least at some subconscious level, he is happy to go along with whatever Montserrat and Estelle order him to do.
Montserrat's motives for developing this new mind-control technique appear to have been partly idealistic; he was hoping to use it to enable old people like himself to recapture some of the joys of their youth. About halfway through the film, however, a new conflict arises, that between Montserrat and Estelle. She discovers that she has a greater power to control Mike than does her husband and, drunk with power, forces him to commit ever more immoral acts, starting with stealing a fur coat and progressing to two murders. To his horror, Montserrat finds that he has lost control over Mike, who under Estelle's influence has become a monster. There is a contrast between Karloff, who plays Montserrat with a certain restraint and dignity, and Catherine Lacey who gives a splendidly over-the-top performance as Estelle is transformed from a little old lady into a raving maniac.
Although it is not an overtly political movie, the control which Montserrat and Estelle exercise over Mike may reflect the feeling of many young people that they were subject to the unwanted controlling influence of the older generation. This was, after all, the period when young men were being sent by elderly or middle-aged politicians to fight in Vietnam. There is a similarity with "Witchfinder-General" which also features a villain who exercises a controlling influence over the minds of others, although Hopkins does so by playing on superstitious beliefs rather than by hypnosis. One difference between the two films is that "Witchfinder-General" is, like "The Wicker Man", a rationalist horror film in which it is superstition, not the supernatural, which should frighten us. In "The Sorcerers", however, Estelle seems truly demonic; despite the bits of scientific-looking equipment we see, her level of control over Mike seems (as the title may indicate) like something supernatural rather than the result of any scientifically explicable phenomena.
Unlike some critics, I would not regard either of these two films as great masterpieces. Reeves, however, was clearly a highly promising director before his career was tragically cut short, and both "Witchfinder-General" and "The Sorcerers" are films which retain plenty of interest even today. 7/10
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