The costumes of the Hamelin worthies are exaggerated and highly theatrical, and make it clear that Demy’s middle ages are defiantly non-naturalistic – a land of fable rather than historical verisimilitude. They are also buffoonish outfits, casting the figures of authority who wear them as grotesques, caricatures of their own warped desires and ambitions. The Burgermeister and his wife’s social aspirations are displayed in the absurd extravagance of the hats they struggle to keep aloft during the tactical marriage of their young daughter to the slimy Franz, the Baron’s son (a mercenary wedding of new money and bankrupt aristocracy).

Diana Dors (as Frau Poppendick, the wife) in particular carries spectacularly over-the-top headgear throughout, which she manages to keep admirably well-balanced. The portable marquee which tents her features with such ostentatious modesty early on could be seen as a satire on Hollywood medievalism, with its queens and princesses in conical turret bonnets trailing wafty clouds of gauze. The Baron has a spritish, tapering cap which looks like it's been soaked in algae, or is some fungal growth sprouting from his pate. His bullying son Franz has rolls of green cloth layered in foppish folds atop his floppy, patrician mop.

The bishop has his papal hood rising in a mitred, scarlet shield, but his face is also shrouded in a nunnish wimple. These fools’ caps are designed to conceal and disguise, or connote status, but only serve to emphasise the wearers’ vanity, pretension or madness. The players, on the other hand, have loose tunics which hide nothing, and Melius, the alchemist who is the town’s figure of learning and reason, dresses in a simple and noble robe.

The prevalence of British character actors heightens the air of grotesquery. Roy Kinnear, as the Burgermeister Poppendick, brings his usual comic mannerisms into play. He is every inch the businessman who has made his pile through dodgy dealing, and is shifty, opportunistic and completely untrustworthy. He’s also utterly ineffectual as a public figure, and offers muttered asides as to the helplessness of it all. Diana Dors plays his domineering wife Frau Poppendick, one of the bellowing, comic shrews she specialised in during the 70s. She shifts with complete assurance between red-faced shrieking and saucy, winking lasciviousness, and its clear that she’s having a bit on the side with Franz.

The thickly curling horns of her wedding bonnet, shaped like indulgent French pastries, seem to mock her cuckolded husband, whose gnomish, priapically extended fez is a pathetically overcompensatory response. Donald Pleasance’s Baron is a mad, muttering recluse, retreating to the shadowy spaces of his castle, and ultimately to the shuttered nook of his coffined bed. His dank lair is covered with morbid murals of devils and skeletons, promising diverse varieties of detailed torment.

They are the outward projection of his clammy, twisted mind. Peter Vaughan’s Bishop is a guiltily perspiring serpent, desires as tightly constrained as his face-hugging costume. They are transformed into poisonous bile which his religious authority affords Papally sanctioned expression. John Hurt’s Franz, the privileged scion of the Baron, is poutingly sullen, lighting up only with the sadistic satisfaction he derives from the cruelty which his inherited power and its attendant aura of fear allows him to indulge.

Diana Dors  : dame Poppendick / John Hurt  : Franz et Cathryn Harrison : Lisa

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All of these exaggeratedly self-interested and power-hungry characters, with their various political ambitions, parallel the powers at play in Ken Russell’s The Devils, released a year earlier in 1971. Russell’s film is entirely dissimilar in tone, but does bear comparison in its use of stylised costume and set design and in its clear parallels with contemporary social, political and military conflicts. Both films are, in their own ways, intensely moral, and unafraid to declare their allegiances, even if this results in a certain schematic division into good and evil.

The various powers in Hamelin all have their own schemes, put forward by their leaders. They conspire together in order to realise them, and to maintain their position. Burgermeister Poppendick and his wife wish to graft themselves onto an aristocratic family tree. To do this, they are prepared to marry off their daughter, still a child, to the slimily unappealing Franz. In this way, Frau Poppendick will also have her lover on hand, even if he would by then be her son-in-law. Franz’s aside to the Bishop during the wedding feast makes it clear that he too is fully aware of this, but chooses to tactically turn a blind eye.

The sexual hypocrisy of the powerful, who put on ostentatious masks of piety and rectitude, is revealed in the end when Franz reaps his just reward and catches the plague whose proliferation he has enabled. The black circle which almost instantaneously appears on his cheek resembles the patches dotting the faces of the characters in Hogarth’s moral fables; patches which cover syphilitic scars.

The Baron is obsessed with building a new cathedral in Hamelin, facing his castle. This is not so much a monument to the glory of God as a further expression of his power and his preening ego. The Bishop is obviously keen to encourage this, as it would enhance his own prestige. But he is aware that the mad Baron has no practical idea of the costs involved, and the Burgermeister and his guild heads have already taxed every possible local resource. The half-built cathedral façade, with its idle workers and wooden winches and scaffolding, is like an unfinished set. It could perhaps be seen as an admission of budgetary limitations, or as a pointed rejection of Hollywood historical spectacle.

The economic exhaustion which the extravagant fancies of the Baron has created has hints of the 70s downturn (although the ’73 OPEC oil hike had yet to make its devastating impact), with images of builders sitting disconsolately inactive about the site striking a resonant note. The rising towers of the cathedral could also be seen as a reflection on the greed of property speculators in the 60s and 70s, erecting grandiose buildings in prime locations and then letting them lie empty for years while they waited for rents to rise, and for sufficiently wealthy tenants to move in.

The high-rise modernist office block Centre Point, in the heart of London, was one of the most notorious cases. It lay empty for some 5 years after its completion in 1967 at a time when unemployment and homelessness were rising steeply. The cathedral is only ever seen in the form of its architectural model, or as an elaborate cake produced for Franz’s wedding, another sign of its cynically political provenance. The cake’s delicately iced rose windows and arched doors are shattered by the rats which emerge from within, causing the whole structure to collapse in a symbolic rubble of crumbs and sugary dust.

au centre :Hamilton Dyce - l'éminence représentant du pape

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A Papal envoy, carried into the town in a palanquin resembling a wooden coffin, is a representative of an echelon of power far surpassing the provincial concerns of the Hamelin elite. His demand for soldiers for the Pope’s expansionist campaigns makes it clear who is really in control, and prompts further scheming. There is no money to pay men to goto war, and not enough of them to spare anyway. Franz comes up with the idea of a children’s army. Their innocence can be exploited by offering them worthless fool’s gold,which he will force the alchemist to forge. Implicit contemporary parallels are drawn with Vietnam, and the young me drafted to fight there.

With the arrival of the rats and thepanic over the spread of the plague they bring in their wake, the cynicism and self-serving actions of the Hamelin authorities reaches a new, murderous pitch. Franz’s insistence that Melius, the alchemist and apothecary, devote his attentions to the creation of the fool’s gold for his children’s crusade rather than concoct a preventative medicine to protect against the plague shows a willed blindness. It’s a blindness which gives precedence to short-term capital gains over the management and care of the natural environment.

Again , a concern very much in tune with the times, and the dawning awareness of impending ecological crises. The dark and unsparing representation of the hypocrisy and viciousness of power which lurks behind the grotesque surface of the film’s colour-coded villains reaches a climax with the burning of Melius at the stake. His heresy is the assertion that the plague is caused by natural means, and can thus be cured by natural methods. The Church claims it is a curse sent by God, and rests its authority on such a position. The Bishop is not about to have his authority challenged, and pronounces sentence with scarcely a moment of reflection. He is backed up by the Baron and Burgermeister, Church, State and Commerce uniting to serve their own interests.