Director: Sidney Hayers
Stars: Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair, Margaret Johnston
Short Review, no spoilers
When psychology professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) discovers
that his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) is a witch, he orders her to destroy all of
her magical paraphernalia, cynical as he is to her protestations that they are
needed for protection from hostile forces. What Norman doesn’t realise is that
he owes Tansy and her sorcery more than he can imagine. This excellent slick
and scary witchcraft horror from the 1960s is beautifully shot, engagingly
performed and a valuable addition to any cult enthusiast’s collection.
Full Review (spoilers)
Like John Holden (Dana Andrews) in Jacques Torneur’s 1957 cult
classic, Night of the Demon, Norman Taylor is a cynical psychologist determined
to discredit the power of witchcraft. However, despite their best efforts, in
both cases their scepticism is eventually quite vividly expunged throughout the
course of these respective films. What Norman doesn’t know is that he is
married to not only a believer, but a practising witch who conducts her rituals
right under his nose! Furthermore, black magic is real in this movie so Norman’s
dismissals come across as arrogant and, unlike Tansy, he is completely
oblivious to the fact that their perfect life is under constant threat.
Tansy is edgy from the beginning, her furtive glances making
apparent that a game of bridge played with fellow campus dwellers is far from
innocuous. Later, she breathlessly scurries around while her husband prepares
for bed, eventually finding the source of her anxiety – a poppet tied to the
fringe of a lamp, which she immediately removes. This, and the fact that
everything starts going weird and bad when Norman finds Tansy’s witchy
artefacts and orders her to destroy them, tells us that Tansy’s fears are not
ill-founded. Without the protection of her magical meddling, things go from bad
to worse for Norman – a student accuses him of rape, another threatens him with
violence, and unnerving stuff happens at home to do with telephones, tape
recordings, thunderstorms and rattling doors. Quite touching though is the fact
that Tansy is prepared to sacrifice more than most for the man she loves, even
to the point of sacrificing her life.
As much as feminists may well roll their eyes at this, it is
nevertheless interesting to place Tansy in a sub-type of modern day/housewife
witch, as seen in comedic mode in the Bewitched TV series two years after this
film, and projected through art horror angst in George A. Romero’s Season of
the Witch ten years after that. Perhaps because of the popularity of Bewitched,
this character type seems more familiar than the actual number of examples
would seem to support. The not strictly housewife model, but fulfilling the
idea of an attractive witch transported from medieval England and fairy-tales
to the heart of modernity was also seen previously in I Married a Witch (1942)
and Bell Book and Candle (1958). The dramatic tension these types seem to
provide is in the idea of formerly conceived wicked ugly women from another
world re-imagined in ways that interrogates women’s roles in terms of sexuality
and power. They also frequently support notions of women, particularly
housewives, of having secrets and double lives – careful men! What’s the missus
really up to when you’re out all day at work?! There’s got to be a lot of
things worse than finding out she’s a witch, right? In Night of the Eagle,
there is both a good and bad witch - the good is a beautiful, homely and
exceptionally self-sacrificing wife and the bad is a viciously jealous
manipulator. What both do is appeal to the housewife witch fantasy of women who
secretly have more power than anyone expects, including their husbands.
As well as gender politics, Night of the Eagle also offers
some excellent horror imagery, culminating in a spectacular and surprisingly
scary scene in which Norman is attacked by a giant eagle transformed from a statue
above one of the university buildings. Yeah I know it’s just a real eagle shot
to look like it’s huge, but it’s done remarkably well and in such a way to be
genuinely frightening. If you’ve seen an actual bald eagle, they’re massive
anyway so I wouldn’t fancy my chances with even a regular one. The influence of
this scene can be spotted in Suspiria when the character Daniel is killed in an
empty square at night – just before, a shot-reverse-shot shows the statue of an
eagle atop a building disappear in one of many creepy moments in the film.
There are nice details too, such as when Norman has survived
the eagle attack, a blackboard is seen with the ‘not’ rubbed from a chalked
phrase reading ‘I do not believe’ – Norman unwittingly re-writes his own words,
with no choice but to abandon his previous scepticism. Also clever is how
Norman discovers that his wife has been possessed by Flora – by her
characteristic limp as displayed by Tansy when she attempts to murder Norman.
In terms of performance, both leads are very good – Wyngarde
in his dissolution from self-righteous science-head to feverish panic, as the
extent of his wife’s self-sacrifice and the danger she is in becomes fully
apparent; and Blair conveys well the subtle flutterings of restrained worry as
she strives to keep the wolves from the door. Stealing the show for me though,
is Margaret Johnston as Flora Carr, a deliciously nasty adversary who would fit
right in at one of Dario Argento’s covens had she come along ten or so years
later.
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