Peter Wyngarde

Night of the Eagle

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Janet Blair and Peter Wyngarde

Everyone is on their game in Night of the Eagle, an American-financed, British-made horror movie that gets it just about all right, even though the ingredients don’t look like they’re up to much. Peter Wyngarde stars, a cult actor here one year on from The Innocents – one of the best British horror films ever made – sinking his teeth into the role of the rationalist lecturer who has all his beliefs upended when he discovers his wife is a witch. Norman Taylor (Wyngarde) is doing OK at the college where he lectures and when not instructing his students on the real underpinnings of superstition (something vaguely to do with neurosis, it’s suggested) … Read more

The Avengers: Series 5, Episode 11 – Epic

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Mrs Peel surrounded by a halo reading a ZZ Schnerk Production

When writers run out of ideas, they either start cannibalising their own old ones (see the episode from two weeks’ prior – The Correct Way to Kill), they duck into comedy (no refuge for a series that already has its tongue boring a hole through its cheek) or they reach for genre parody. Epic dips its toe in the water of the third option in an episode that parodies old-school Hollywood excess. Kenneth J Warren, Isa Miranda and Peter Wyngarde are the guest actors drafted into play a trio of archetypes, arch types, even – Warren is an Erich Von Stroheim stripe of director, all monocle, bullet head and high-flown notions of the importance … Read more

The Avengers: Series 4, Episode 21 – A Touch of Brimstone

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Emma Peel as the Queen of Sin

And so we come to A Touch of Brimstone, an episode that didn’t make it onto US TV screens in 1966, thanks to the bondage gear that Mrs Peel eventually gets into in the final scene. How we get there is pretty interesting too. The whole thing opens very cinematically with a lovely shot of the back of an armchair advancing towards the camera. It’s being pushed by Peter Wyngarde, no sign of the luxuriant moustache that made him a household name in Department S and its Wyngarde-focused spin-off Jason King, though he is sporting fancy shirt cuffs and links, a foreshadowing of King’s sartorial style. Wyngarde’s character, John Cleverly Cartney, is at … Read more