A Field In England

This is a limpidly brilliant hallucinatory black-and-white cinema-poem, telling the story of the arrival of 4 soldiers at a field during the dog-end of an English Civil War battle; their prosaic, pungent wrangling and traipsing, and their encounter with O'Neill, or The Devil. Magi

mushrooms are gorged on, muskets are discharged, a couple of genuinely horrifying, macabre, blackly comic sequences follow our band of brothers as they attempt to dig up the treasure that O'Neill insists is there somewhere. The exchanges between O'Neill and the Lacemaker are brutal encounters between a priapic, unswerving libidinal drive and a vacillating dutiful everyman and the strongest moments in the film.