Director Michael Reeves started making films when he was just eight years old. It was the beginning of a passion that lasted his whole life, until his tragic and untimely death at the age of 25 in 1969.
When Reeves was sixteen he he flew from England to Los Angeles, where he turned-up on Don Siegel’s doorstep and asked the veteran director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a job. Siegel was impressed enough to offer the teenager a job as his assistant. Reeves used his time with Siegel to learn the director’s craft and make the contacts he would later use to help finance his own films.
Returning to Europe, Reeves wrote and directed his first feature film Revenge of the Blood Beast (aka The She Beast), which starred Barbara Steele and Ian Ogilvy. Reeves’ collaboration with Ogilvy began at school, and lasted throughout the director’s career. Ogilvy then starred alongside Boris Karloff in Reeves’ next wonderful and weird movie The Sorcerers. He was just 23. But it was his last film, Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) again starring Ogilvy, but this time with Vincent Price, that established Reeves as one of the most talented, proficient and startlingly original directors of the decade.
Witchfinder General should have been the beginning of Reeves’ career as an international film director, but within months of its release he was dead from an accidental alcohol and barbiturate overdose
In 1961, when Reeves was seventeen, he directed and appeared (under the name “Martin Reade”) alongside Ogilvy as two criminals in the short, silent film Intrusion. It’s the earliest existing film by Reeves—strange, and unnerving, with jump-cuts, bizarre editing, and violence. Intrusion was dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard, and it certainly appears to have been influenced in its style by the great French director’s Breathless (À bout de souffle). More of a curio now, Intrusion is the earliest known film by Michael Reeves, which only gives a small hint of the talents that would blossom during the sixties.
Previously on Dangerous Minds