cinema history class: the magnificent obsession of michael reeves

Session: Documentaries, Week 2
Movie: The Magnificent Obsession of Michael Reeves (2019)
Directed byDima Ballin 

As I did last year for documentary month, I am temporarily abandoning my usual format.

Michael Reeves grew up obsessed with movies and dreamed of directing American-style epics.  He directed three movies, two of which are considered highly-influential in British cinema). Less than a year after the third, Reeves died of an accidental overdose at age 25.

We've actually seen two -- the influential two -- of the movies in class,* but I hadn't put them into context. I hadn't realized that they were from the same director, and I certainly didn't realize how influential Witchfinder General was. That, despite remembering the famous stories of how Reeves butted heads with Vincent Price. This documentary did a good job of driving the point home.

Whereas The Search for Weng Weng, which we saw in week 1, never really got us beyond viewing Weng Weng as a 2'9" object, Magnificent Obsession did a really good job of giving us a full picture of Reeves as a real person -- with talents and foibles, passions and weaknesses. It did that by featuring extensive interviews of people who knew the man -- people who worked with him and who considered him a friend.

I was particularly surprised to learn that Reeves wasn't actually into horror or violence. He was making horror movies because he felt that it was the best way to establish himself as a reliable director who's movies would make money. His goal was to make Hollywood movies. This makes it all the more poignant that he died at 25 before he could realize that dream. And a couple of the people interviewed for the movie talked about the high promise that his career had.

All that having been said, I am actually skeptical about whether he would have achieved the wider-recognized greatness that others expected of him. To Baker, who had worked with him, described their last meeting, two months before Reeves' death. Reeves had clearly had some kind of mental break. Between that and his need for medications, I think it's perfectly plausible that his best work was behind him. Of course, that is something we'll never know for sure.

Because this documentary didn't skimp on clips, and because of its emphasis on people who knew tyhe subject personally, this was much better than the prior week's documentary.

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*I wrote about The Sorcerers here. We saw Witchfinder General before I started this blog, so I didn't write about it.