In an ideal world, I would have re-read Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife (1943) before seeing Night of the Eagle (released in the U.S. as Burn, Witch, Burn, 1962), the second and most seriously regarded of its three film adaptations.1 Since the world is imperfect and all of my Leiber is in storage, I haven't read the novel since high school and as far as compare-and-contrast goes can note only that the film hews very closely to the novel's premise, but the ending differs drastically and there's less explicit possession than I remember. Since even an imperfect world has its consolations, however, I can also tell you that Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn is really, really good.
The story is a classic clash between skepticism and the supernatural, cleverly personalized by its central couple. Dr. Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) is the rising star at Hempnell Medical College, an arrogantly handsome sociologist who opens his class by forcefully chalking the words "I DO NOT BELIEVE" onto the blackboard. These, he claims, are the "four words necessary to destroy the forces of the supernatural, witchcraft, superstition, the psychic, et cetera, et cetera," all of which he further glosses as "a morbid desire to escape from reality . . . another futile attempt to control's one environment and the forces of nature"; like many an anthropologist before him, he subscribes to the position that the primitive explanations of myth and religion inevitably give way to the hard proofs of science, of which the latest exemplar is the atomic bomb, so much more destructive than any Aladdin's genie. In the ordinary world, you can say this sort of thing and the worst that happens is that you sound like Richard Dawkins. In a horror story, there isn't a better spell for summoning a short sharp smack upside the head, and in fact it doesn't take long for Norman to discover that his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) is a practicing witch. Her magic looks like a combination of movie voodoo and medieval European witchcraft, all hair-tied charms and packets of dirt, skulls and bells and root-wrapped fetishes stashed at strategic locations around their clean, professorial, middle-class house. She began to study it in Jamaica, she claims, when her husband was grievously injured and she swore unhesitatingly to exchange her life for his at need; she has worked charms for his safety ever since and defends her decision with real, urgent fear in her voice: "I will not be responsible for what happens to us if you make me give up my protections . . . That faculty would have seen you dead a long time ago if they could have managed it!" She is speaking of the faculty wives even more than the husbands who have lost out on appointments and popularity, the embittered Evelyn Sawtelle (Kathleen Byron), the droll, catty Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston). We have already seen, after the weekly evening of bridge at the Taylors', Tansy frantically searching under tables and inside drawers until she finds the thing that is causing her distress, a little stitched dolly hidden in the fringe of a lampshade. Norman hasn't, but it wouldn't dent his rationalism if he had. He insists that Tansy burn all of her talismans, intending to prove by a lack of dire consequences that they were nothing but unhealthy superstition. Exhausted by the argument and afraid of losing him, she complies.2 The very next morning, Norman is almost hit by a truck as he walks his usual route to class, gracelessly dropping his books in the wet road; that is a very small foretaste of just how bad his day is about to become.
This film is one of the few times in my life I've been glad Peter Cushing didn't take a part—originally cast as Norman Taylor, he withdrew to star as the eponymous parson/smuggler of Captain Clegg (1962). Not only would we not have gotten Gemma Files' Hammer Pirates cycle had he stayed, I think the tone of the film would have changed entirely. Cushing could play difficult characters, but his best talent was for suggesting vulnerability under the stuffiest or flattest of exteriors. Fifteen years younger than Cushing and last seen as Peter Quint in Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), Wyngarde projects a crucial aggressive complacency that permeates his marriage as well as his classroom, revealing itself in startlingly insensitive remarks like "If we were to investigate all the strange rituals performed by women based on their so-called intuition, half the female population would be in asylums." He's bewildered by the vehemence of his wife's assertions because it has never occurred to him to question his charmed life—why shouldn't his students get the best grades? Why shouldn't the dean favor him as department chair? Isn't he just that much wiser and more capable than everyone around him? Doesn't he deserve it, knowing as he does what's best for everyone better than they do themselves? Even as his professional life begins to collapse amidst charges of sexual misconduct and his physical security is endangered by violent confrontations and unseen visitations at night, Norman's insistence on maintaining a rational frame of mind—which means ignoring everything his wife is telling him—keeps him unsympathetic far longer than might be expected, gaining in the audience's estimation only when he starts to worry more about his wife than about himself.3
( After all that's happened, do you mean to tell me that you still put it down to natural causes? )
This is less than I wanted to write about a movie I really enjoyed, but I have in no way recovered my sleep deficit and the world remains imperfect.4 I don't care if Night of the Eagle was budgeted like a B-picture, it's beautifully put together. Reginald Wyer's black-and-white cinematography is deep-focus and poetically framed, offering expressionist shots like the haze-haloed point of view of an entranced woman or a moment of invocation seen through the blurring heat-shimmer of fire, as if the ordinary appearance of things is only a rippling scrim. Music is by William Alwyn, whom I always like—he introduces notes of the "Dies Irae" as a deal nears its deadline, turning midnight to doomsday. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont adapted the script, but I know nothing about director Sidney Hayers, so I can't tell who was responsible for the strong Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton vibe; its closest cinematic relatives feel like I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and the justly legendary Night of the Demon (1957). Its only real failing is a criminal underuse of Kathleen Byron, an actress who could imply the presence of demonic forces with nothing more than a little lipstick. This opinion brought to you by my perceptive backers at Patreon.
1. The other two are Weird Woman (1944) and Witches' Brew (1980). All three preserve the basic idea of witchcraft being performed on a college campus as an escalation of the normal faculty infighting; the details otherwise vary wildly. I am vaguely curious about Weird Woman, the second of the Inner Sanctum spin-off films, but not at all about the other. It looks like a wacky magical comedy. Even Lana Turner in her final film role is not enough of a draw.
2. Viewers who understand sympathetic magic may have difficulty not screaming at Norman when, carelessly tossing out the protective herbs from Tansy's locket, he flicks his own portrait into the fire. It's clear soon enough that the forces ranged against him would have given him sufficient trouble all on their own, but destroying his own image really can't have helped.
3. I am also unconvinced that Cushing would gotten to play so many of his scenes shirtless—Wyngarde has an interestingly bony face and a saturnine voice to support it, but the camera really appreciates his tight-muscled chest with its Connery-class fur. Of course Norman has always been used to being thought attractive, provoking admiration and jealousy; it's just one more gift taken for granted that comes back to bite him.
4. I do wish to note somewhere that technically I saw Burn, Witch, Burn because it was the American version, including the spoken prologue by Paul Frees, setting a protective charm around the audience in a darkened, sonorous baritone strongly reminiscent of his "Ghost Host" for Disney's Haunted Mansion; the film closes with the similarly arch end title "Do you believe?" where the British version, as far as I can tell, merely states "The End." It's a bit William Castle, but in no way mood-destroying. I have used the British title throughout because it's the original and the only one that makes sense of a recurring shot of a piece of campus statuary.
The story is a classic clash between skepticism and the supernatural, cleverly personalized by its central couple. Dr. Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) is the rising star at Hempnell Medical College, an arrogantly handsome sociologist who opens his class by forcefully chalking the words "I DO NOT BELIEVE" onto the blackboard. These, he claims, are the "four words necessary to destroy the forces of the supernatural, witchcraft, superstition, the psychic, et cetera, et cetera," all of which he further glosses as "a morbid desire to escape from reality . . . another futile attempt to control's one environment and the forces of nature"; like many an anthropologist before him, he subscribes to the position that the primitive explanations of myth and religion inevitably give way to the hard proofs of science, of which the latest exemplar is the atomic bomb, so much more destructive than any Aladdin's genie. In the ordinary world, you can say this sort of thing and the worst that happens is that you sound like Richard Dawkins. In a horror story, there isn't a better spell for summoning a short sharp smack upside the head, and in fact it doesn't take long for Norman to discover that his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) is a practicing witch. Her magic looks like a combination of movie voodoo and medieval European witchcraft, all hair-tied charms and packets of dirt, skulls and bells and root-wrapped fetishes stashed at strategic locations around their clean, professorial, middle-class house. She began to study it in Jamaica, she claims, when her husband was grievously injured and she swore unhesitatingly to exchange her life for his at need; she has worked charms for his safety ever since and defends her decision with real, urgent fear in her voice: "I will not be responsible for what happens to us if you make me give up my protections . . . That faculty would have seen you dead a long time ago if they could have managed it!" She is speaking of the faculty wives even more than the husbands who have lost out on appointments and popularity, the embittered Evelyn Sawtelle (Kathleen Byron), the droll, catty Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston). We have already seen, after the weekly evening of bridge at the Taylors', Tansy frantically searching under tables and inside drawers until she finds the thing that is causing her distress, a little stitched dolly hidden in the fringe of a lampshade. Norman hasn't, but it wouldn't dent his rationalism if he had. He insists that Tansy burn all of her talismans, intending to prove by a lack of dire consequences that they were nothing but unhealthy superstition. Exhausted by the argument and afraid of losing him, she complies.2 The very next morning, Norman is almost hit by a truck as he walks his usual route to class, gracelessly dropping his books in the wet road; that is a very small foretaste of just how bad his day is about to become.
This film is one of the few times in my life I've been glad Peter Cushing didn't take a part—originally cast as Norman Taylor, he withdrew to star as the eponymous parson/smuggler of Captain Clegg (1962). Not only would we not have gotten Gemma Files' Hammer Pirates cycle had he stayed, I think the tone of the film would have changed entirely. Cushing could play difficult characters, but his best talent was for suggesting vulnerability under the stuffiest or flattest of exteriors. Fifteen years younger than Cushing and last seen as Peter Quint in Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), Wyngarde projects a crucial aggressive complacency that permeates his marriage as well as his classroom, revealing itself in startlingly insensitive remarks like "If we were to investigate all the strange rituals performed by women based on their so-called intuition, half the female population would be in asylums." He's bewildered by the vehemence of his wife's assertions because it has never occurred to him to question his charmed life—why shouldn't his students get the best grades? Why shouldn't the dean favor him as department chair? Isn't he just that much wiser and more capable than everyone around him? Doesn't he deserve it, knowing as he does what's best for everyone better than they do themselves? Even as his professional life begins to collapse amidst charges of sexual misconduct and his physical security is endangered by violent confrontations and unseen visitations at night, Norman's insistence on maintaining a rational frame of mind—which means ignoring everything his wife is telling him—keeps him unsympathetic far longer than might be expected, gaining in the audience's estimation only when he starts to worry more about his wife than about himself.3
( After all that's happened, do you mean to tell me that you still put it down to natural causes? )
This is less than I wanted to write about a movie I really enjoyed, but I have in no way recovered my sleep deficit and the world remains imperfect.4 I don't care if Night of the Eagle was budgeted like a B-picture, it's beautifully put together. Reginald Wyer's black-and-white cinematography is deep-focus and poetically framed, offering expressionist shots like the haze-haloed point of view of an entranced woman or a moment of invocation seen through the blurring heat-shimmer of fire, as if the ordinary appearance of things is only a rippling scrim. Music is by William Alwyn, whom I always like—he introduces notes of the "Dies Irae" as a deal nears its deadline, turning midnight to doomsday. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont adapted the script, but I know nothing about director Sidney Hayers, so I can't tell who was responsible for the strong Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton vibe; its closest cinematic relatives feel like I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and the justly legendary Night of the Demon (1957). Its only real failing is a criminal underuse of Kathleen Byron, an actress who could imply the presence of demonic forces with nothing more than a little lipstick. This opinion brought to you by my perceptive backers at Patreon.
1. The other two are Weird Woman (1944) and Witches' Brew (1980). All three preserve the basic idea of witchcraft being performed on a college campus as an escalation of the normal faculty infighting; the details otherwise vary wildly. I am vaguely curious about Weird Woman, the second of the Inner Sanctum spin-off films, but not at all about the other. It looks like a wacky magical comedy. Even Lana Turner in her final film role is not enough of a draw.
2. Viewers who understand sympathetic magic may have difficulty not screaming at Norman when, carelessly tossing out the protective herbs from Tansy's locket, he flicks his own portrait into the fire. It's clear soon enough that the forces ranged against him would have given him sufficient trouble all on their own, but destroying his own image really can't have helped.
3. I am also unconvinced that Cushing would gotten to play so many of his scenes shirtless—Wyngarde has an interestingly bony face and a saturnine voice to support it, but the camera really appreciates his tight-muscled chest with its Connery-class fur. Of course Norman has always been used to being thought attractive, provoking admiration and jealousy; it's just one more gift taken for granted that comes back to bite him.
4. I do wish to note somewhere that technically I saw Burn, Witch, Burn because it was the American version, including the spoken prologue by Paul Frees, setting a protective charm around the audience in a darkened, sonorous baritone strongly reminiscent of his "Ghost Host" for Disney's Haunted Mansion; the film closes with the similarly arch end title "Do you believe?" where the British version, as far as I can tell, merely states "The End." It's a bit William Castle, but in no way mood-destroying. I have used the British title throughout because it's the original and the only one that makes sense of a recurring shot of a piece of campus statuary.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}