Past Misdeeds: Night of the Eagle (1962)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Young, dynamic academic Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) teaches soft sciences at a British medical school. Despite him and his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) being relative newcomers at the school, Norman is something of a rising star of the faculty, despite largely unspoken resentments towards the modern young couple coming from parts of Norman's colleagues. Most of his students love him (some perhaps a bit too much), and his teaching is so successful he is already one of the possible candidates for becoming the new chair of the Sociology Department. Why, it's as if Norman leads a charmed life!

The life of the Taylors becomes rather less charmed when Norman discovers the secret Tansy has been keeping from him ever since their research trip to Jamaica two years ago when she began to believe in things Norman can't abide anyone taking seriously: Tansy is a witch, completely, and rather intensely, convinced their good fortune is the product of her magic rituals; furthermore, Tansy is just as convinced that someone in the faculty is so displeased by the newcomers he or she tries to inflict malign influences on them, and it is only Tansy's protective charms keeping them healthy and happy.

Norman, being an early 60s husband, at once diagnoses Tansy as “a neurotic”, and coerces her to burn all charms and protections and stop with the nonsense in the kind of tone which should by all rights earn him a kick in the unmentionables. Right after the charms are destroyed, Norman's luck starts to turn. A student (Margaret Abbott), who was heavily crushing on him already, suddenly becomes rather more aggressive, and, when that doesn't get her anywhere, starts telling his bosses about the affair they supposedly had (in truth, Norman isn't that sort of a jerk), with vague insinuations of rape.

That's just part of the very bad, no good Monday Norman has. It seems as if all the little and all the large things that always went his way now turn against him. And that's before somebody sends him a tape of one of his (sceptical) lectures that has been turned into a death curse Tansy will use a very desperate way to counter. It looks as if Norman will have to rethink his position regarding witchcraft and the religion of his wife, or die.

Night of the Eagle is the second movie based on (house favourite) Fritz Leiber's fine, if not completely unproblematic in its gender politics, novel Conjure Wife (well, it may be based on the original 1943 novella version of the story for all I know), with a script written by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and George Baxt. Given the pedigree of the writers, it doesn't come as a surprise that this script is quite a complex one that features a rather sardonic - though probably quite true - view on campus politics, suggests complexities in its characters with quick and sure strokes, and isn't afraid to have ideas without feeling the need to explain them to the last detail. For the last part, it probably helps it was not written in this century when everyone in the movie business seems convinced no audience is able to understand anything without a film spelling it out.

Among the movie's most interesting decisions is the early characterisation of Norman as a complete jerk who reacts to his conviction that his wife might be mentally ill with throwing a hissy fit at her, and as the kind of guy who thinks that believing in witchcraft automatically makes one mentally ill, prefiguring what I like to call the arsehole atheism of people like Richard Dawkins, a thing quite horrible to this (hopefully) non-arsehole atheist. While the way Norman treats his wife seems pretty much in tune with the mainstream ways of US white middle class people of the era, the script really doesn't agree with him there, seeing as he is after all absolutely wrong in all of his assumptions about Tansy and about life. In fact, it's not difficult to read the whole movie as a critique of a way of life that turns the union of two people on equal footing into something loveless and self-destructive by the mere power of convention.

To make matters even more interesting, the film also goes out of its way to demonstrate that at heart, Norman loves Tansy just as much as she loves him (and she's willing to die to protect him!), he just needs to re-learn how to express it; the film repeatedly suggests that it is societal constraints and Norman's willingness to follow them that's the core of the problem here.

Stylistically, Night of the Eagle attempts to follow in the footsteps of the subtle, stylish horror of Val Lewton productions, with many more horrors suggested than are ever shown. Unfortunately, director Sidney Hayers isn't quite on the level of Robert Wise or Jacques Tourneur, and for every moody, ambiguous scene, there's another one where Hayers is basically standing next to the viewer and shouting "Look! this is a visual metaphor! See! This scene is dark and brooding!". It's never so bad as to ruin the film but Hayers's inability to be as subtle as his script does needlessly undermine some of his film's power.

Janet Blair's performance, unfortunately, falls very much into the same trap, with no possible emotion she doesn't shoutily mug into the camera with wild stares and a peculiar habit of dramatically rubbing her own face. This approach to acting is quite grating, particularly since it stands in complete contrast to Wyngarde's rather more subtle and naturalistic performance. It really is a shame, for it's not difficult to imagine how great Night of the Eagle would have turned out with a female lead working on the same level, or a director who is consistently subtle and ambiguous.


Still, despite these flaws, Night of the Eagle is generally a fine attempt at following in the footsteps of Lewton; it might not be as good as it could be, but it still is a plenty moody and intelligent movie standing in a small yet proud tradition of slightly different horror filmmaking.