By visiting this page and reading the articles below, it should be understood that much that has been written about Peter in the press is inaccurate. However, you may come to understand how many of the bizarre myths about him began…
Jason King still reigns, just less of a woman’s man
TV HERO Jason King was the epitome of the dilettante dandy in the 1970s, breaking crime rings and hearts with equal gusto.
By Marco Giannangeli – 28 March, 2015
For some, his famous breakfast quip “a bit too early for coffee… I think I’ll have Scotch”, will for ever hold memories of a bygone, more carefree era.
Actor Peter Wyngarde, who played the suave author-cum-spy in Department S and Jason King between 1969 and 1972, was once mobbed by 30,000 hysterical Australian women at Sydney airport, although his career stalled in 1975 when he was fined for gross indecency in a bus station toilet.
Now the wavy locks of hair are gone, the moustache is duly trimmed and the clothes, said by Hollywood star Mike Myers to have inspired the Austin Powers look, are somewhat tamer.
Still, at 86, Wyngarde was the star attraction yesterday as he signed autographs at the London Film Memorabilia Convention.
He still had a gaggle of adoring female fans clamouring to speak to him.
He once admitted: “Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself. Yet when I think about it now, I’m amazed I’m still here.”
Life was not always so lush, however. As the son of a diplomat he grew up in different countries and was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded during the Second World War. Author JG Ballard was a fellow prisoner of the Japanese at Shanghai’s Lunghua civilian internment camp in 1943.
An International Man of Mystery
Written by Andrew Stuttaford – 17th February, 2018.
A few weeks ago, a British actor died at the grand old age of 90 (probably). Peter Wyngarde’s death was accompanied by wryly affectionate obituaries and, among Brits of a certain age, a certain sadness: For a brief iridescent moment, one of the zanier icons of their youth had shone. Now he was gone.
According to an early-1970s survey, 40,000 Australian women chose Wyngarde as the man to whom they would have liked to lose their virginity. He was voted Britain’s best-dressed male personality, admittedly no great feat, in 1970 and then again in 1971. Mobbed by tens of thousands of women — how many virgins is unknown — on his arrival in Sydney, he took three days in hospital to recover.
Despite an “amorous” crowd, held back by 50 policemen, there was a gentler conclusion to Wyngarde’s opening of a menswear store in Plymouth, a city in the more sedate southwest of England. A writer for the website Hellfire Hall, “part of the official Peter Wyngarde Appreciation Society,” recalled that Wyngarde, “wearing a grey speckled suit with a mauve shirt and matching tie, tried on several garments#…#before settling for a black leather jacket and an aubergine-colored suit.” (Aubergine is British English for eggplant.)
This might be the moment to mention that Wyngarde, or rather Jason King, the character and self-caricature (“a romantic extension of myself” he once said) he played on television as the Sixties seeped into the Seventies, was the inspiration for Austin Powers. An old episode, or even a still, is all it takes to understand why.
Wyngarde reached this peak after appearances on the stage, in a film or two, and, increasingly, in television drama. The Sixties being the Sixties, he gravitated towards roles in telly-time treats designed for a Britain beguiled by James Bond. He showed up in The Prisoner, The Saint, and (most notably as the Hellfire Club’s John Cleverly Cartney) The Avengers. The latter two were part of a stable of not-always-so-serious action and adventure shows produced by ITC, a company run by a wily British TV mogul with an eye on the American market.
ITC enlisted Wyngarde (he signed his contract on a napkin over a meal) in Department S, a new series about three agents working for a crack Interpol unit. There was a former G-man and a female computer expert, and then there was King, best-selling crime writer, ladies’ man, charismatic, eccentric, flamboyant, witty, ingenious. His moustache was dramatic. His tailoring was epic. His fights didn’t always work out too well, but his shrewd, knowing performance stole the show, and in Jason King he was given his own.
For 26 gloriously ludicrous episodes in 1971–72, King spent a great deal of time peacocking across what was, to poorly traveled Britons held back by low incomes, high taxes, and tough currency controls, an impossibly glamorous Europe. A tax exile (of course), King lived in Paris (of course) and sauntered through capers involving typical caper casts, including double agents, a Bulgarian master criminal, Soviets, exotic aristocrats, and shifty British intelligence operators. There were casinos. There was skiing. More light-hearted than Department S, Jason King parodied a genre that was already close to parody. It was an exercise in absurdist high camp, winking at an audience unaware of how far the joke really went.
King drove a Bentley S2 Continental coupe. He smoked Sobranie Imperials, a brand far longer than its stubby proletarian equivalents, and enjoyed Champagne and strawberries for breakfast, as, apparently, did Wyngarde. Then again, it might be “a bit too early for coffee.#…#I think I’ll have Scotch.”
King’s gait was a self-satisfied prance. His hair was bouffant, with a cascade behind, a waterfall over the ears, and an exclave on his regularly exposed chest. Sideburns erupted off an angular face, and Zapata lived on in his moustache. And the clothes! The suits, Wyngarde advised, were inspired by an 18th-century riding jacket, lapels so broad they waved hello to his shoulders, the ends of their sleeves concealed by the cuffs of his shirts, folded back with artful nonchalance, a trademark.
He smoked Sobranie Imperials, a brand far longer than its stubby proletarian equivalents, and enjoyed Champagne and strawberries for breakfast.
King’s big-knotted wide ties were often — just as on that day in Plymouth — the same color as his shirts, another trademark. His boots were snakeskin, his dressing gowns silk, his foulards silk, his cravats silk, his voice silk. His coats were sweeping, his caftans evoked decadence in Tangier rather than a grubby pilgrimage along the hippie trail, and his tight leather outfit was worn with obvious and unashamed delight.
Wyngarde fell short of the matinee-idol standard (ITC’s boss grumbled about his failure to look like The Saint’s Roger Moore), but women, sometimes in hot pants, sometimes in less, sometimes in more, didn’t seem to mind as they succumbed, not always one by one, to King’s louche charms. A medallion swung and so did King, a Lothario, but despite the occasional appalling comment (a habit he shared, like so many others, with Wyngarde), no Weinstein.
Nearly a decade after Jason King had ended its run, readers of the X-Men comic books discovered that the original name of the villainous mutant Mastermind, a member of another Hellfire Club who looked — how can I put it — somewhat familiar was Jason Wyngarde, evidence — as if any were needed — of how tricky it was to work out where Wyngarde ended and King began. To judge by some unflattering comments from one or two of his colleagues, Wyngarde may have not found it too easy to do so himself. He even “lent” King his clothes, and with them, much of his style: “I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy, I used to go to the tailor with my designs,” he confessed later, surprising nobody.
On the show itself, King’s adventures were interwoven with those of Mark Caine, his fictional creation and alter ego: In its first episode, King, the author, pitches a Mark Caine adventure to an American TV producer. The fictional Caine is played by the fictional King and the fictional King by the real — that adjective will have to do for now – Wyngarde playing Wyngarde as Wyngarde wanted Peter Wyngarde to be seen by his fans.
The X-Men’s Mastermind had the ability to project illusions, to make people see what he wanted them to see.
In 1970, capitalizing on the success of Department S, Wyngarde released an LP, modestly called Peter Wyngarde. RCA had told him he could do what he liked. Fools! What the record company got was what Wyngarde’s obituarist in the London Times describes as a “revoltingly seedy album ”a bizarre and pretentious collection of songs, more spoken than sung, and, in its saner moments, designed (we must hope) as a not entirely serious showpiece of what a Jason King (who gets a shout-out at its nadir) might relax to or seduce to:
Do go in
No, the lights haven’t fused – it’s candlelight.
Now what would you like to drink — I’ve started on Champagne.
That is a beautiful dress! Do sit down
No, not over there – it’s too far away.
Come over here, it’s closer to everything.
Other tracks veered onto far more dangerous ground, most notoriously the supposedly jokey, undeniably very creepy “Rape,” about which the less said the better. RCA pulled the album after its first pressing. Decades later it was reissued by an independent label under the title “When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head.”
By then, sex had done rather more than that: In 1975, Wyngarde was found guilty of committing an act of “gross indecency” with a truck driver in a provincial British bus station. This followed an official warning for something similar the previous year. Wyngarde blamed a “mental aberration” (the first incident had been a “misunderstanding”). He received a token fine, but the spell was broken. His career never recovered. Prejudice played its part, but the scandal had shattered an image inextricably connected to that of King’s globe-trotting Casanova. Making matters worse, within a year or so, the bleakness of late-1970s Britain, and the fashions that came with it, had reduced King to an embarrassing memory too recent for nostalgia to rescue. Wyngarde’s mannered style of acting only reinforced the impression that time had passed him by. A battle with alcohol and a reputation for being “difficult” won’t have helped either. His best-known role after his fall was in Flash Gordon, where he played the sinister General Klytus face hidden behind a golden mask.
The bleakness of late-1970s Britain, and the fashions that came with it, had reduced King to an embarrassing memory too recent for nostalgia to rescue.
But Wyngarde’s mask was subtler, a flickering, layered creation. Sometimes it wasn’t even there at all. If he hid, this King’s Road magnifico, known (some say; along with so much else in Wyngarde’s biography, there is a debate about this) in some showbiz circles as “Petunia Winegum,” hid in a way still possible before the Internet’s panopticon gaze, not quite in plain sight, but not far from it either. There are hints in Department S and Jason King that all was not as it seemed (and even more so in that infamous LP), although the reality may have been less clear-cut than newspaper headlines and men’s-room walls after Wyngarde’s conviction liked to suggest. We will never know for sure: Thus there was a marriage in the 1950s, and something seems to have happened with Vivien Leigh, Scarlett O’Hara no less. Years later, when there was no longer any need to pretend, there was still a touch of King in the way Wyngarde described past encounters with the opposite sex, perhaps even with an approximation of accuracy. Who’s to say? The mask was allowed to slip only so far. It had, after all, been the work of a lifetime, a product of necessity, fantasy, and ambition.
The early sections of Wyngarde’s Wikipedia entry (at least as I write) are evidence of a wild reimagination at work: “Peter Wyngarde’s date and place of birth, his birth name, and his parents’ nationalities and occupations are all disputed.” Well, yes. He was born between 1924 and 1933 in either Marseilles or Singapore (probably in Singapore in 1927, although Wyngarde preferred to cite Marseilles in 1933). His father was not a diplomat named Wyngarde, but Henry Goldbert, a naturalized Brit from Ukraine, who seems to have been a merchant seaman, at least for a while. His mother was either a French or a Swiss national and may have been Eurasian. Wyngarde said she looked like Claudette Colbert and was a racing driver. Then again, Wyngarde also claimed that he was a nephew of the French actor Louis Jouvet (he wasn’t), that he’d studied for a few months at Oxford (he hadn’t), and that Peter Wyngarde was the name he was born with (Cyril Goldbert just wouldn’t do).
It is true that he was interned by the Japanese during the later stages of the Second World War in a camp near Shanghai. The British writer J. G. Ballard, a rather more highly regarded teller of tales, was also there (an experience that inspired his Empire of the Sun) and remembered him (as Goldbert) from those years. For his part, Wyngarde said that he had no memory of Ballard. Maybe it was too awkward to admit to the connection: Ballard had known him while the mask was first being assembled. Goldbert, unlike Ballard (who was interned with his parents), was alone. It was there that he turned to acting and not, I suspect, only in the camp’s makeshift theater. His performances included a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which he played every part.
Is that really Jason King, the suavest man on TV?
21 March 2010
ONCE he was an international sex symbol, regularly mobbed by screaming girls and boasting a clutch of ‘best-dressed man’ awards.
But when Seventies television star Peter Wyngarde was spotted out shopping near his West London home last week – clad in knitted hat, camouflage jacket, wrinkly leather trousers and scruffy trainers – it was clear his fashion sense had deserted him a long time ago.
Wyngarde – now 76 – made his name playing a suave crime author and investigator with a penchant for groovy chicks in the cult adventure shows Department S and Jason King.
With his flamboyant suits, bouffant hair and lush moustache he soon became one of the best known characters on television.
Wyngarde’s heart-throb status once led to him being mobbed by 30,000 hysterical women at Sydney airport, and he even had his own fashion column for women in a daily newspaper.
His adventures as Jason King were a send-up of spy and detective dramas such as The Saint and The Avengers – a typical plot would see King drive his Bentley to a country mansion where he would drink champagne with the owner and flirt with his attractive daughter before arresting everybody.
He once said: ‘I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me. I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy – I used to go to the tailor with my designs.’
Wyngarde’s camp style was later adopted by the comic Mike Myers as the basis for his own spoof-sleuth creation, Austin Powers. But Wyngarde’s career ran off the rails in October 1975 when he was fined £75 for gross indecency, under his real name Cyril Louis Goldbert.
And it emerged in a 2007 biography of actor Alan Bates that Wyngarde had been living a double life. Wyngarde was married briefly in his 20s, but had an affair with Bates that is said to have lasted ten years. Their relationship is believed to have begun in 1956, after Bates made his debut in Look Back In Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
After his arrest, Wyngarde did stage work in South Africa and Austria, before making an appear- ance as a masked villain in the 1980 movie Flash Gordon.
He blamed ‘small-minded people’ for ruining his TV and film career, and admitted in an interview in 1993 that he developed a drink problem.
‘Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself,’ he said.
‘I drank myself to a standstill. When I think about it now, I’m amazed I’m still here.’
As a child, Wyngarde was interned by the Japanese in a prisoner of war camp – the same camp where Empire Of The Sun author J.G. Ballard was held.
Cult TV star Peter Wyngarde’s snakeskin jacket sells at auction
27th March, 2020
A snakeskin jacket and a “best dressed man” award were among the items belonging to 1970s TV star Peter Wyngarde to sell at auction.
The actor, who starred in ITV’s Department S and the spin-off Jason King, died aged 90 in January 2018.
The sale was conducted online, presided over by auctioneer Andrew Stowe in his Bristol living room, because of coronavirus distancing restrictions.
He said it was a rare “white glove” sale, meaning all lots sold.
The auction fetched more than £35,000, with the sartorial award – given to Wyngarde in 1970 – selling for £2,200.
Wyngarde’s dress sense is said to have inspired Mike Myers’ comic creation Austin Powers.
The actor also appeared in Flash Gordon and Dr Who.
Mr Stowe, from East Bristol Auctions, said: “It was a wonderful auction and I hope some of the lots have put smiles on faces – something we all very much need right now.
He added: “This auction was conducted from a laptop on my dining room table – quite different to the usual auction room setting, but we sold every single lot in the sale.
“I think this may have been the first live auction ever conducted from an auctioneer’s living room.”
A pair of prop glasses used in Wyngarde’s television series sold for £700 and a personal edition of his banned 1970 album When Sex Leers its Inquisitive Head, sold for £600.
Sense of occasion suits the Peter Wyngarde estate sale perfectly
Peter Wyngarde would surely have appreciated the drama that accompanied the auction of his estate – held with the country in the grip of coronavirus.
The flamboyant actor’s collection was offered at East Bristol Auctions on March 26, with more than 350 lots from his estate, comprised of items from his private residence in Kensington, as well as props and costumes from a long career.
Auctioneer Andy Stowe said: “The rostrum was my dining room table, with the dog asleep at my feet. I was operating the software entirely myself, which was surprisingly easy. I felt more like a Youtuber than an auctioneer, but it was a really great experience – and one I’m sure we’ll be repeating soon. We had lots of new bidders in this auction, and the feedback we’ve had has been completely lovely.
“Both our sales last week were actually fantastic – which is wonderful given the circumstances.”
Wyngarde (1927-2018) appeared in most 1960s-70s ‘cult’ programmes including Doctor Who and The Avengers and took leading roles in his own shows Jason King and Department S.
He later went through difficult times in his life but the fondness with which he must be regarded was obvious from the interest from bidders, with a white-glove sell-out auction resulting. Stowe added: “We had lots of celebrity interest in this sale with several of the buyers being well-known presenters, actors and pop stars. It had an amazing celebrity reaction on social media.”
Highlights included a guitar signed by his good friend Freddie Mercury (which sold for £720), several of his trademark sunglasses and silk handkerchiefs, as well as items he collected and displayed in his apartment. These include several autographs from people he admired – most notably Clark Gable and Tony Hancock – as well as his collection of taxidermy and artwork.
Pictured top and below are five highlights we have singled out. All results given are hammer prices. East Bristol’s buyer’s premium on top is 18%.
Concert posters for some of the earliest appearances by well-known bands have taken keen interest from bidders in recent months (such as our Pick of the Week in ATG No 2435, a poster advertising an early gig by The Who at the short-lived Blue Moon club in Cheltenham, sold for £11,500 at Gardiner Houlgate’s auction).
Sold at a mid-estimate £2200 to a Beatles collector as part of the Wyngarde auction was an original 1960s Beatles poster, from their concert at the Abergavenny Town Hall Ballroom on June 22, 1963. It measured 2ft 5in x 20in (74 x 50cm) and was printed by Arthurs Press Ltd, Stroud. Wyngarde was an acquaintance of the band.
Pictured here is Wyngarde’s personally owned copy of his self-titled 1970 album on vinyl. The centrefold features a message from Jason King (Wyngarde’s character from the 1970s television series of the same name). Estimated at £100-200, it sold for £320.
A lot of personality
One of the best sellers was an item highly appropriate given Wyngarde’s sartorial elegance: his original John Stephen Fashion Award ‘Best Dressed Personality’ hallmarked silver trophy. The trophy in the form of Beau Brummell, complete with monocle and top hat, has hallmarks for Carrington & Co, London, 1970.
The (39cm) tall award was given to Wyngarde in the summer of 1970 by Miss Radio Luxembourg. The votes for him, cast by listeners of Radio Luxembourg and readers of FAB 208 (a magazine), were far in excess of his rivals Cliff Richard and footballing legend George Best. Photographs of Wyngarde with the award have featured in many publications.
Stowe described it as “probably the best piece of Wyngarde memorabilia in the sale”. Estimated at £300-500, it sold for £2200.
This is hiss-tory
Wyngarde’s love of fashion included an array of 1960s-70s garments which can be viewed as gorgeous or ghastly depending on your viewpoint. The buyer of this snakeskin jacket was certainly delighted. Stowe said: “He is a a huge fan and UK collector – he is very happy with his purchase, and will be proudly displaying it in his living room (he got in touch with me on Twitter!).”
The original screen matched prop/costume snakeskin jacket was worn by Wyngarde for Department S (1969) and Jason King (1971). It had no maker’s label and was probably custom-made for the actor. Included in the lot, estimated at £200-300, was an original vintage publicity photograph showing Wyngarde in this very jacket.
It sold for £880.
Here comes the sunglasses
Another high price came for a pair of screen matched sunglasses, as worn by Peter Wyngarde as Jason King in both Department S and Jason King.
This a pair of Oliver Goldsmith glasses, with lightly tinted lenses and distinctive inlaid stars to each arm, was worn by Wyngarde in several episodes of the series, as well as his personal life. They featured prominently in several episodes including A Deadly Line In Digits (as part of King’s disguise), and are first seen in the Department S episode The Trojan Tanker.
Estimated at £80-120, the glasses sold for £700. Stowe said: “These were the most iconic pair of glasses we had from Wyngarde – they appeared in lots of episodes of Department S and Jason King, as well as loads of publicity photos. I was surprised they went for so much, but not surprised they got that much interest.”
Peter Wyngarde memorabilia snapped up at auction
Snakeskin jacket among items belonging to cult star who played Jason King from 1969
26th March, 2020
A snakeskin jacket, silk kaftan smoking gown and chunky golden rings once sported by the fictional television writer turned sleuth Jason King have been sold at auction.
The items were among a trove of memorabilia that belonged to the late cult star Peter Wyngarde, who played the bushily moustached King from 1969 to 1971.
In 1970 Wyngarde was declared Britain’s best-dressed male personality and new parents across the nation named their children Jason after his character. His look became something of a national joke as fashions changed and Wyngarde’s star waned. Mike Myers has said King was an inspiration for Austin Powers.
Wyngarde died in 2018 aged approximately 90 – his life story is shrouded in mystery – and more than 250 items were auctioned online by East Bristol Auctions.
The auction turned out to be a “white glove sale”, when every lot goes. Unusually, there were no bidders from overseas, but several unnamed British actors and pop stars snapped up pieces.
Wyngarde’s “best-dressed personality 1970” trophy attracted the keenest bidding, selling for £2,200. He beat Cliff Richard and George Best to the award that year.
A mirror in the form of King in psychedelic duo-tone pattern was sold for £420. The actor’s personal teddy bear went for £700.
A number of vintage scarves that Wyngarde wore as King were on offer, as were plenty of sunglasses and a pair of cowboy boots crafted by the century-old Mallorcan company Tony Mora.
An original vintage Medico Medalist smoking tobacco pipe, which the catalogue said was “very likely a prop that Wyngarde used”, was also up for grabs.
A signed photo from Vivien Leigh went under the hammer, as did a costume necklace that Wyngarde wore in the Lenny Henry Show blaxploitation movie sketch Nathan Gunn in the 1990s.
Wyngarde also had some rare Beatles memorabilia, including an original poster from the band’s Abergavenny Town Hall Ballroom performance in 1963.
Another intriguing item was described as “an incredible set of believed unheard Robin Gibb song lyrics, presumed to have been written for actor Peter Wyngarde”. The song in question, I Will Surrender, comes with the note: “Words and music by Robin Gibb, 1970.”
Wyngarde went on to play the chief of the secret police, Klytus, in the 1980 movie Flash Gordon, and the silk neckscarf he wore at the New York premiere was up for sale, as was a guitar apparently signed by Freddie Mercury. Queen performed the film’s title track.
By the time he appeared in Flash Gordon, Wyngarde had been through difficult times. In 1975, he was found guilty of gross indecency in a bus station toilet. Newspapers reported that he was summoned under his real name of Cyril Louis Goldbert. A tabloid later reported that his mop of hair was thinning and covered in a flat cap.
Poignantly, an “original vintage Ray Marston Wig Studio-made wig/toupee” was on sale. The catalogue said: “The toupee of usual form, with a fine mesh base. Supplied within its original box, addressed to Wyngarde at his personal residence. A rare item from the Peter Wyngarde estate.” It went for £170.
Jason King actor Peter Wyngarde was even better onstage
Taken from the The Borehamwood and Elstree Times – 12th July, 2020. Written by Paul Welsh MBE is a Borehamwood writer and historian of Elstree Studios.
Welcome once again to our ramble down Memory Lane, via Dead Men’s Gulch and Young Lovers’ Point. I hope you are all ok and while still obeying the rules can now venture out into this strange new world. No doubt in a couple of years time they will make a movie about this very strange era and word on the grapevine is Zac Efron wants to play me! Look him up and you will see we could be doubles.
Alas I had a fall the other day, landing on and smashing a 1960s glass topped wooden table in my lounge. Luckily the glass shards flattened rather than went into my body and I did not hit my head. I take this as a sign from the grim reaper that he enjoys this column.
I have just been reading a book about the late actor Peter Wyngarde, who those of you of a certain age or like cult television will remember starring in Jason King and Dept S, which were shot at Elstree Studios. He was certainly a larger than life character but a great actor. Overall his stage work was probably more impressive than his screen appearances, but sadly that vanishes with the generation that saw it. For instance I never saw Laurence Olivier on stage. He is described as the greatest actor of the last century. It is very hard to decide from his screen appearances. I wish I could have met him.
I was invited to his memorial service to represent Elstree Studios at, I think, Westminster Abbey with the Studio Managing Director the late great Andrew Mitchell. We were given ‘front row seats’ facing the aisle the great and the good would process down. If you don’t believe me I still have a BBC video that shows us, which I must get transferred to that new fangled device called a DVD. It was the hottest ticket in town and everybody was there, from the widow of Boris Karloff to a young Ken Branagh, who was stupidly called the new Olivier. Who the hell wants to be labelled a new anybody?
I have digressed again from Peter. I met him twice in the late 1990s at Elstree Studios. He was among the guests I organised for the reopening of Elstree Studios in 1996 along with Liz Fraser, Nigel Hawthorne, Christopher Lee, Sylvia Syms, Ron Moody, Pat Coombs, William Lucas and others. He then asked for a private meeting at the studio. Well that is a story for another day. I thought he was was a great actor and a nice chap.
Well, until next time take care until we next walk down Memory Lane.
Cult Movie: 1960s British horror Night Of The Eagle is ‘a seriously spooky treat’
Taken from The Irish News – 27 December, 2019
WHEN it comes to delivering shocks on the silver screen, I’ve always been a fan of the old ‘less is more’ maxim. Give me the sound of a clock chiming in a moody night-time scene or a gnarly finger nailed hand emerging from a dusty old coffin over a gruesome, no holds barred modern gore fest any day.
In terms of what makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, it’ll always be the carefully created mood of unease rather than the needless blood bath that does it for me.
The king of such understated mood movies was director Jacques Tourneur. The films the Frenchman made for RKO Pictures in the 1940s with producer Val Lewton embody that world of dreamlike wooziness and creeping dread and are rightly revered as cult classics today. Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie and The Leopard Man are low budget films that are high on mood and atmosphere.
Outside of Night Of The Demon, Tourneur’s own masterful slice of macabre mood magic which he directed in 1957, very few films of that type were ever made in England. Night Of The Eagle is a rare exception.
Released in 1962, it was directed by Sydney Hayers and starred the great Peter Wyngarde, in his first starring role, and Janet Blair in a tale of everyday witchcraft in an English university. TV’s future Jason King Wyngarde is Norman Taylor, a young psychology professor who is rising through the academic ranks at an alarming speed. Blair played his loyal wife, Tansy, who has been making that rise to success happen by indulging in a little black magic in the home.
Shot in crisp black and white and made for a minuscule budget, the effects are small but the mood is mighty. Tansy learnt her skills while the couple lived out in Africa and there’s something believable about the small items of magic like dead spiders, graveyard earth and little dolls she secretes about the home.
The trouble is, other members of the academic community are also practicing witches and, when Norman is set up in sex scandal with a young student, the battle for power commences.
Hayers, a jobbing director with mostly TV credits to his name, shoots all this intrigue with a bold, almost dreamlike style, and watching the arrogant Norman start to reassess his attitude to the dark arts as the film progresses is fascinating. He starts out a true non-believer and winds up quite the opposite as the forces of darkness – and an ominous stone eagle that sits over the university – start to take over.
Wyngarde is, as always, stylish and brilliantly aloof throughout and Blair is terrific as the devoted wife who’s dabbling in the dark arts.
The slow-burning script from Twilight Zone regulars Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont is low on action but it’s worth sticking with as the mood it creates is truly unique. It may not be up there with Tourneur’s finest work but it’s still a seriously spooky treat all the same.
For more about Peter and the press…
© Copyright The Hellfire Club: The OFFICIAL PETER WYNGARDE Appreciation Society: https://www.facebook.com/groups/813997125389790/
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 
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