The travellers had become used to witnessing ritual executions and punishments since they had crossed from the land of Rheged into the kingdom of Northumbria. It was not the fact that a man had been hanged on a crossroad tree that caused the small party of travellers to halt. The contorted hands, still sticky with blood, showed that the man had not died without a struggle. The clothes were torn and if the man had worn sandals then they had since been taken by scavengers for there was no sign of any footwear. The head was twisted at an awkward angle where the neck had been broken.
The body swung to and fro in the faint breeze, suspended at the end of a stout hemp rope from the branch of a squat oak tree. The blood and spittle around his twisted lips had not even dried. This is not a film for insomniacs but good for those with a bit of patience.The man had not been dead long. Burton looks genuinely annoyed at everything, and as this was Billy Connolly back when he was funny, he's enjoyable too. There's very little by way of action, but one burst of violence took me by surprise in it's brutality (a nasty axe to the face scene). It's yet another one of these seventies movies where the plot zigs and zags and somehow retains a dark atmosphere that modern films somehow can't quite emulate.
However, the tables turn as the young pupil confesses that he's murdered somebody, but is he telling the truth or is it just all mind games to drive old rummy Burton out of his mind? This film is deadly, deadly slow, but quite on purpose. Brian Glover appears as a policeman that gives out a good old seventies police kicking for good measure. Vexed by Connolly's free spirit and nimble banjo plucking, Burton sets out to get rid of the Glaswegian hippy and get his pupil to return where every adolescent boy belongs: in a school run by Catholic priests. Meanwhile, Billy Connolly of all people turns up as a drifter and after being told to bolt by Burton, sets up camp on the school grounds and begins to turn the sneaky pupil's head onto drink and drugs and living free. He's all for slapping down the disabled, annoying pupil while praising the sycophantic, sneaky pupil (I've forgotten their names already).
Angry looking, twitchy Richard Burton stars as a priest at an all boys school.
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