Burn, Witch, Burn

 There are many things to love about the film Night of the Eagle. It's title is not one of them. There is an eagle in this film, a stone one hanging over the entrance to the college chapel door and later, a thing in feathered trousers terrorises Peter Wyngarde through the corridors. But the eagle is not at the centre of this film in the way that, say, a demon is at the centre of Night of the Demon or the living dead are pretty key to the action of Night of the Living Dead. The American title was Burn, Witch, Burn, which is a bit better, and that sentence is actually spoken in the film. But, best of all, is writer Fritz Lieber's original title, Conjure Wife, is the best fit. The story is about a wife. She conjures stuff. 

That wife is Tansy Taylor (Janet Blair) and her husband, Norman, (a lustrous and cocky Peter Wyngarde) is a psychology professor at an English University and a rationalist of almost bone-headed stubbornness. Bad news for him, then, that Tansy's a witch, and it's her witchy skills that are protecting the blithe Norman. Norman thinks it's all him, of course, and is mightily pissed off when he discovers she is practising obeah - which she picked up on her Jamaican honeymoon. Norman destroys all her magic paraphernalia, while she begs him not to. 

And all hell breaks loose. 

The rest of the film is the unravelling of the smug and self-assured Norman, as his world collapses about him. It's delicious to watch. Far from the louche internationalist he would later become, Wyngarde's Norman Taylor is one of those breed of complacent know-alls sixties British cinema excelled at, unruffled and clubbable, in crisp white shirts and high-waisted terylene strides. Ten years, maybe even five years earlier, Norman would have been played by a barking, pally Kenneth More, and he would have been the hero. Here, in the confused, neurotic sixties, Norman is the damsel in distress, all his certainties shattered, his self-worth ruined, his thesis in ribbons. He knows nothing until he knows he knows nothing. 

Tansy, heroically, attempts to sacrifice her own life for her husband's, and Norman is only able to save her by recognising the wacky world of witches is FOR REALZ. And after running away from a big bird in big feathery trousers. 

A word on Australian actress Margaret Johnson, here playing Flora Carr, the wife of one of Norman's rival academics. She is incredible in this film. No spoilers, the film's only 63 years old, you've probably not had a chance to see it, but her performance is simply remarkable. Wyngarde is fantastic: wide eyed and buckled by fear, but she is simply extraordinary. You'll see. 

The film clearly alludes to Tourneur's Night of the Demon from five years earlier - hence the peculiar name change - and that film features a similar mulish scientist caught in the glare of the irrational (though Dana Andrews barely breaks a sweat, raises an eyebrow, he probably couldn't) but it also lays a pathway to the the following year's Unearthly Stranger, a peculiar suburban sci fi. In Night of the Demon, there is the real possibility that all women, certainly *gasp* all educated women, are witches. In Unearthly Stranger it seems all women are aliens. 

Not sure how that works.