To the Devil a Daughter (1976) - film review

John Verney is surprised when his friend, Henry Beddows, asks him to collect his 17-year-old daughter Catherine from the airport and take her back to his London apartment.  Verney, a writer of Occult fiction, is intrigued by Catherine, who has spent all of her life in a German convent run by an obscure religious order.  Unbeknown to Verney, Catherine was born into a dangerous Satanist cult, led by the sinister priest Michael Rayner.  The latter intends to abduct Catherine and reincarnate her as the satanic god Astaroth on her eighteenth birthday...

To the Devil a Daughter was the film that brought down the curtain on one of the most successful series of films made in Britain, the much loved and oft-derided Hammer horrors.  It is a very different work to Hammer’s previous horror offerings, in both style and subject.  It eschews the familiar Gothic trappings and Grand Guignol theatricality in an attempt to cash in on the fad for supernatural psychothrillers exemplified by Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).  With its contemporary setting, the film more closely resembles an episode of the hugely successful television series that Hammer would make in the 1980s, Hammer House of Horror.  This is Hammer’s third adaptation of a Dennis Wheatley novel, following The Devil Rides Out (1968) and The Lost Continent (1968).  It bears virtually no resemblance to Wheatley’s novel and, not surprisingly, was reviled by the author.

From the very outset, To the Devil a Daughter ran into production difficulties.  Director Peter Sykes was unimpressed by the original screenplay and hired Gerald Vaughan-Hughes at the last minute to rewrite it.  The script was not even half-completed by the time the film went into production and scenes were being written and re-written a matter of hours before they were due to be shot (hence the disjointed narrative and botched ending).  The person who was most aggravated by this creative chaos was the lead actor Richard Widmark, who added to the travails by managing to get up the back of just about everyone involved on the production.  He walked off the set in annoyance on a number of occasions and came close to abandoning the film, which he considered to be a Mickey Mouse venture.

Whilst the film has its flaws, it has much to commend it, particularly the slick photography and editing which effectively build the tension and make a somewhat silly storyline chilling and almost plausible. There are also some strong performances from a hugely talented cast, which includes some well-known British actors – Christopher Lee, Honor Blackman and Denholm Elliott – as well as American screen icon Richard Widmark and the alluring debutante Nastassja Kinski (the 15 year old daughter of the great German actor Klaus Kinski).   Watch out for cameo appearances by Brian Wilde and Frances de la Tour, who featured in two of the decade’s most popular British sitcoms, Porridge and Rising Damp.

It is a pity that the film is so marred by its horror excesses (which includes an ill-conceived shot of an unconvincing foetal devil squirming in its birth blood) and a diabolically weak denouement.  The original ending was deemed to be too similar to that of an earlier Hammer film (probably Scars of Dracula) and so a last minute re-edit was attempted, with near-disastrous results.  

To the Devil a Daughter earned mixed reviews but was a box office hit, although most of the takings went to the film’s German and American backers.  Hammer made very little out of it and it certainly did not bail the company out of its mounting financial difficulties.  By the mid-1970s, cinema was a dying art in Britain and Hammer’s demise was part of a wider phenomenon, the failure of the British film industry to compete with Hollywood and lure audiences away from their television sets.  But this was not the end of Hammer.  Like the immortal Dracula, there would come a time when the company would rise from the grave, finding a new lease of life with an infusion of fresh young blood...

© James Travers 2009

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