Beaconsfield: Independent Artists (Production) Ltd., 1961

89 mimeographed pp. in blue stiff paper wrappers, secured with two split pins to left edge. Title and authors typed to front wrapper. Printed and typed call sheet laid in, holograph noted to verso. Wrappers heavily used, worn and marked, some light marking to title page and dog-earing to early pages, but a well-preserved copy.

PETER WYNGARDE’S WORKING SCRIPT FOR NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (1962), WITH HIS OWNERSHIP SIGNATURES TO FRONT WRAPPER AND TITLE PAGE. HEAVILY ANNOTATED, REVISED AND UNDERLINED BY WYNGARDE ON EVERY PAGE, AND ON ALMOST EVERY BLANK. TYPED CALL SHEET LAID IN, WITH HOLOGRAPH NOTES TO REVERSE. Adapted from Fritz Lieber’s 1943 novel Conjure Wife by Twilight Zone veterans Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, and crime writer George Baxt.

Directed by Sidney Hayers and starring Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair and Margaret Johnson, the audience for Night of the Eagle (1962) took a while to build. Wyngarde, his flatmate Alan Bates, and their friend John Schlesinger went to an opening day screening in London, only to find they had the cinema pretty much to themselves. But the stock of Night of the Eagle has risen steadily since that inauspicious beginning. Snappily told and imaginatively shot, this psychological thriller about witchcraft in academia sits between Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957) and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) in a trio of films which bring the satanic into the everyday, without a cauldron or broomstick in sight.

Biographical details about Peter Wyngarde, the film’s star, are both plentiful and sketchy. His real name was Cyril Goldbert. According to his death certificate he was born in 1927, but official documents issued to him during his lifetime bear birth dates ranging from 1924 to 1937. (Wyngarde himself claimed not to know his true age.) He was born in Marseille (or possibly Singapore) to Henry Goldbert, a Ukraine-born merchant seaman -- and not, as Wyngarde claimed, a British diplomat called Henry Wyngarde who appears never to have existed. Wyngarde’s mother Margharita Goldbert, née Ahin, was probably born in Singapore, although Wyngarde always insisted she was French. In 1943 he was interned in Lunghua Camp in Shanghai. J.G. Ballard was a fellow internee there, and knew Wyngarde; for some reason Wyngarde always denied knowing him.

Through the 1950s Wyngarde enjoyed a steady career on British television before being cast as Peter Quint in The Innocents (1961), Jack Cardiff’s classic adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1891). The film’s success brought more film offers -- among them Night of the Eagle. In an interview recorded in 2014, Wyngarde admitted that at first he was unimpressed by the script (’very much in the not-as-good-as-Hammer category’) but decided to do it for a fee of £5,000 7s 6d -- the price of the Bristol 405 sports car he’d set his heart on owning. After Night of the Eagle Wyngarde’s star continued to rise, and two TV series, Department S (1969-70) and Jason King (1971-72), made him a household name, the handlebar moustache and bouffant hairstyles he sported in the shows linking him forever to 70s high fashion, and even higher camp. In his later years he gradually disappeared from public view, and he died in 2018 at the age of ninety. (Probably.)

Wyngarde’s copy of the screenplay of Night of the Eagle, heavily amended and annotated, speaks to his close working relationship with the film’s director Sidney Hayers. Both men thought the story best told by keeping explicitly ‘hocus-pocus’ elements to a minimum, and many of the textual changes here reflect this. Wyngarde has also added a long list of comments, queries to raise, possible moves and props and costume notes to almost every page featuring his character, as well as thoughts on many other scenes in which he does not appear. He even makes occasional and usually self-interested suggestions for camera shots: in the margin of the film’s opening scene, for example, in which Wyngarde’s college lecturer is addressing his students, Wyngarde has written ‘CLOSE-UP PLEASE TO GET SEXY LOOK.’ (Sidney Hayers didn’t oblige.)

The call sheet laid in to the script is dated 4 November 1961, when some of the college interior scenes were shot. True to form, Wyngarde has used the reverse blank to make some more notes and suggestions on scenes still to be shot.

A remarkable script from the production floor of a cult classic. Hitherto unseen, and the working copy one of the most intriguing and perplexing figures of 1970s British popular culture.