When you REALLY have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
Psychology professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) lectures a class on superstition and occult lore, firmly establishing him as a man firmly rooted in the empirically quantifiable and the rational. He's relatively young and happily married and his future at the British university where he teaches looks bright, what with a pretty young student clearly making eyes at him, along with him being under serious consideration for advancement of his academic career. As far as he's concerned, everything is coming up roses, but his wife, Tansy (Janet Blair), knows better. She understands the subtleties of communication between women, specifically her interactions with the other university wives, and she has takes steps to ensure her husband's safety and that of his career against the perceived hostility of the other professors' spouses. You see, Tansy is into the mystic arts, specifically those she encountered during a trip to Jamaica and that she continues to foster on her solo weekends at her cabin getaway. Her position in the all-female power play is made clear early on, during a bridge game with the professors and their wives, and we see the vicious hatred and jealousy fairly radiating from the hateful university secretary, Flora Carr (Margaret Johnston), whose husband's career stalled when Norman arrived. Tansy, being unable to sleep after the bridge game, goes downstairs and discovers a crude voodoo doll made in her image and affixed inside a lampshade, where it was unlikely to be found. Tansy remove the fetish item, cracks it open, spilling its powdery contents into an ashtray and setting them alight.
A hidden item of voodoo.
One
night while searching for a fresh pair of pajamas, Norman rummages
through one of the bedroom dresser's drawers and finds a dessicated
spider in a carved box hidden at the bottom of the drawer. When he
confronts Tansy on this, she nervously laughs it off off, stating it was
a souvenir from her last trip to Jamaica, a gift and "good luck charm"
from a warlock whose acquaintance she had made while there. Upon
returning home from work the next day, Norman notices a bell that Tansy
has hung in the rafter above their house's front door. Puzzled and
thinking back to the spider he'd discovered, Norman's knowledge of
occult lore and superstition is activated and he searches the entire
house, unearthing a plethora of items that are clearly for the use in
spells and ritual, including some sort of juju pouch pinned inside the
collar of his jacket.
A wife's charms exposed.
Disturbed
by the trinkets and by his wife's actions, Norman demands the truth
from Tansy, and he does not like what he gets: Two years prior, during
their trip to Jamaica, Norman almost died and was so close to death that
conventional practitioner of medicine had given up on him. The
desperate Tansy voiced her desire to trade her life for her husbands,
inspired by her witnessing of a local warlock bringing very dead girl
back to life. Without having to forfeit her life, Tansy, inspired by
what she has seen and now believes is unarguably real, begins practicing
the arts of obeah, practices that "seem" to work. Since their arrival
at the university, Tansy has been using her magic to improve
things for her husband while warding off the other women. She declares
that she is a full-on practicing witch, much to Norman's disgust and
annoyance, so he demands that she burn all of her charms while declaring
his disappointment at how someone as smart and rational as his wife
would ever do something so "stupid." Tansy is distraught over this,
stating that they cannot survive with her protections, but she
nonetheless complies and watches in fear as Norman sets her wards
alight. Funny how one's words can come right back to bite one on the
ass, no? From the instant the last of Tansy's items goes up in flames,
Norman's life and career turn into an ever-widening gyre of doom as the
other witches are now free to utterly destroy him. A false rape
accusation from his obsessed student, nearly getting run down by a lorry
driver, a near-deadly confrontation with his most belligerent and now
gun-wielding male student (who was interested in the rape accuser but
was jilted in favor of her infatuation with Norman), strange noises in
and around the house, a cursed audio tape and madness-inducing sounds
from the telephone all add up to Norman beginning to believe, all while a
stone eagle watches and waits. But Tansy is not down for the count. Not
by a long shot...
It's merely a statue...
This
British adaptation of legendary fantasy writer Fritz Leiber's classic
story CONJURE WIFE (1943, but later published in extended novel form a
decade later), does considerable justice to its source material, though
it shifts the location from New England to the U.K. The book has long
been one of my favorites, as I read it as if it were a dark version of
the classic TV sitcom BEWITCHED (1964-1972). While BEWITCHED mined the
concept of a with married to a mundane/mortal husband who tried (and
failed) to get her not to use her powers for often-hilarious comedy,
Leiber aimed for more serious and darker results, and came up with gold.
The story was earlier filmed as WEIRD WOMAN (1944), but its narrative
was reportedly re-jiggered as more of a mystery than a straight-up
supernatural thriller. I have never seen it, so I cannot speak for its
qualities, but I know if I had read CONJURE WOMAN and gone in expecting
something close to the source and got a fucking mystery, I would have
been pissed. Speaking as a fan of the novel, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, which
was re-titled BURN, WITCH, BURN for the American release, I very much
enjoyed this adaptation of it definitely recommend it to those who, like
me, love a good witchy yarn. If I had to sum it up in a nutshell, this is kind of THE CRAFT for grownups.
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