Mon 17 Jan 2011
Reviewed by Dan Stumpf: FRITZ LEIBER Conjure Wife (Book and Film).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy , SF & Fantasy films[11] Comments
FRITZ LEIBER – Conjure Wife. Twayne, US, hardcover, 1953. Penguin, UK, paperback, 1969. First published in Unknown Worlds, April 1943. Reprinted several times, in both hardcover and soft, including: Lion 179, pb, 1953, cover art by Robert Maguire; Award A341X, 1968, and AN1143, 1974 (cover art by Jeff Jones on the latter).
â— Filmed as Weird Woman Universal Pictures, 1944. Lon Chaney Jr., Anne Gwynne, Evelyn Ankers, Ralph Morgan. Director: Reginald Le Borg
â— Filmed as Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!. Independent Artists, American International, 1962. Peter Wyngarde, Janet Blair, Margaret Johnston, Anthony Nicholls. Screenplay by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson & George Baxt. Director: Sidney Hayers.
â— Filmed as Witches’ Brew. Embassy/United Artists, 1980. Teri Garr, Richard Benjamin, Lana Turner, James Winkler. Conjure Wife uncredited as the source. Directors: Richard Shorr & Herbert L. Strock.
Last October I was also in the right mood for Conjure Wife (1943) Fritz Leiber’s classic tale of Black Magic and Campus Politics. It starts off rather predictably, as Professor Norman Saylor, successful sociologist and author of a popular book on primitive superstitions and modern behavior, discovers a trove of charms, voodoo tokens and sundry magic-spell components in his wife’s drawers (a rather fetishistic scene in itself) and learns that while he’s been relegating such things to unimportance, his wife has taken them seriously.
Naturally, he convinces her to destroy them, and naturally, all hell (literally!) proceeds to break loose.
I saw it all coming, but Leiber manages to invest the early scenes with atmosphere and a certain prosaic realism that kept me reading. Then he proceeds to give things a neat twist that generates considerable suspense and leads to one line that absolutely chilled me. I won’t reveal anything further, but I will say that Conjure Wife is a classic worth visiting.
The book was filmed three times: once very respectably in England as Night of the Eagle in 1962, and previously as a dotty “Inner Sanctum” movie from Universal, Weird Woman (1944.) Written and directed by studio hacks (including Brenda Weisberg, one of the few women in the creative end of horror films, whose career, alas, is notable only for being unremarkable) Weird Woman is mostly beneath contempt, but it does offer a kind of silly charm if you can get past the notion of Lon Chaney Jr. as a scholarly academic irresistible to women.
His solemn voice-over soliloquies add another layer of risibility, which fits in perfectly with the over-playing of over-heated dialogue from the rest of the cast. Looking back, Weird Woman is largely devoid of any artistic merit, but I have to say it’s done with an aesthetic consistency that held my unbelieving attention.
January 18th, 2011 at 2:30 am
Evelyn Ankers does what she can with the role and the film…the apparently weak comedic loose adaptation, WITCHES BREW, I haven’t seen but am told even Teri Garr can’t save it.
Yes, first time I read the novel, I was speedreading through the Big Twist/Climax, and did the reader’s version of the doubletake, as in Wow.
Saylor reoccurs in Leiber’s (mostly) more lighthearted short story “Rump-Titty-Titty-TAH-Tee” (which despite the selected syllables, denotes [connotations obvious] an irresistable rhythm and pattern)…I’m not sure he recurs again in Leiber’s works, as opposed to other representatives of Leiber himself.
I love that Award packaged its edition as a supermarket gothic…I have to wonder how readers felt about That.
Among so much of his other work, Leiber’s other two horror novels, OUR LADY OF DARKNESS and YOU’RE ALL ALONE (or its variant, THE SINFUL ONES) are all eminently worth reading. “Smoke Ghost” is necessary reading.
January 18th, 2011 at 2:32 am
In your text, Dan, you consistently misspell Leiber’s name, though you have it right on the header…”lie-burr”
January 18th, 2011 at 7:28 am
A thousand (count’em) pardons!
January 18th, 2011 at 11:22 am
Not at all. Likewise from me…the short story is “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee.” You know, it took me years to see the potential for reading that as off-color.
January 18th, 2011 at 11:55 am
I messed up and didn’t catch the Lieber/Leiber switch-up myself. Thanks for catching it, Todd. I’ve gone ahead and fixed all of the errors in that regard, but I decided not to touch the Rump and Titty refrain. Your explanation speaks for itself.
— Steve
January 18th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
I’ve just confirmed that Jeff Jones did the cover art for the Award paperback. I was pretty sure he was the artist last night, but I didn’t have time to check it out until today.
Reference: http://www.paperbackfantasies.jjelmquist.com/jones.htm
I’ve also just added his name in the credits.
It’s a super, eye-catching cover, especially standing out in the gothics section, I’m sure.
On the starburst label in the lower right corner it says:
“FIRST PRIZE for outstanding achievement in the field of literature: 8th Annual Mrs. Ann Radcliffe Award.”
The award was bestowed in various categories over the years by The Count Dracula Society, with some of the other winners being Boris Karloff, Russell Kirk, Forrest J. Ackerman and Ray Bradbury.
January 18th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
I love Conjure Wife! I’ve seen the ’62 film which is decent if not especially thrilling. I have a strange urge to see the ’80 film though I’m sure it will make me howl. The novel could make a great film. Pity.
January 18th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
CONJURE WIFE is good, but OUR LADY OF DARKNESS is absolutely brilliant. A superb M R James pastiche as well as a fine novel in its own right.
January 18th, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I have belatedly discovered (that is the only way I discover anything) that Todd Mason of Comments #1, 2 and 4 above, has reconstituted a weekly forum on his blog
http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2011/01/tuesdays-overlooked-films-andor-other.html
called Tuesday’s Overlooked Films. He’s also done this blog the honor of including the films made of CONJURE WIFE among those of this week’s suggestions, even though it was not posted with that intent in mind.
Check the others out by using the link above.
January 18th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Jeff Jones is now a woman.
Whatever sexual or gender quirks (s)he has, Jones has done a lot of enjoyable covers.
January 18th, 2011 at 9:36 pm
Thanks, Steve!
Dozy–well, Jeff Jones could only resonate with the content of CONJURE WIFE, which takes an inherently misogynist premise and turns it on its head for feminist purposes.
Award also did a printing or so with the cover without the CDS award on it (that version is the paperback of CONJURE WIFE I have)…the Society was an oddly ad hoc kind of thing, that would seek to award a novel that had been in print for 25 years or so at that time. I hope the gothic readers enjoyed CW…and Jones’s cover did observe the formula that Ace Books supposedly pioneered for gothics…the woman running away from the house with one lit window.
Some time back on my blog, in a post on Romances That Dare Not Speak That Name/Label, I posted that Jones CW cover and a similar Paperback Library edition that sold Jane Austen’s NORTHANGER ABBEY as a supermarket gothic…well, it was, as I noted, an OG (original gothic), if a bit of a parody of them, too…