Over the weekend, while preparing a pie, I threw in a DVD of an old film that I’d seen at a matinee as a kid – Bert I’ Gordon’s The Magic Sword. Gordon was a schlockmeister, turning out low-budget science fiction, horror, and fantasy films in the 1950s and 1960s on budgets even lower than Roger Corman’s (although I’ve come to admire his creativity in wringing good results for minimal cost), but this film was uncharacteristically expensive and ambitious – he hired Basil Rathbone and Estelle Winwood for it, it starred a young Gary Lockwood six years before he played Frank Poole in 2001 and it had Maila Nurmi – the original Vampira – as both a temptress and an ugly hag. It was extravagantly filmed in color, and had numerous effects, including a two-headed fire-breathing dragon (an elaborate puppet). Still pretty impressive overall.
The climax features a Wizard’s Duel between Estelle Winwood’s Sybil the Witch and Basil Rathbone’s Evil Sorceror Lodac. It occurred to me that Wizard’s Duels had featured in three films from about the same time. The Magic Sword, which came out in 1962, was the oldest of them. There was another film featuring such a duel between Vincent Price as Dr. Erasmus Craven and Boris Karloff as Dr. Scarabus in The Raven from early 1963 (the film also has Peter Lorre as another wizard and a young Jack Nicholson as his son. The film was produced and directed by the aforementioned Roger Corman, who obviously spent more than Gordon for his cast and effects). And there was still a third in the Walt Disney film The Sword in the Stone between Merlin and Madame Mim. That film was a free adaptation of T.H. White’s 1938 book of the same title, which left out all mention of Robin Hood/Wood, for instance. When White adapted the book as the first section of his novel The Once and Future King he changed it considerably, removing all mention of Madame Mim. It’s been a while since I read either White novel, but I seem to recall a duel between Mim and Merlin in that book, although it would not have been along the same cartoony and comedic lines as in the Disney film. You could also make a case for a Wizard’s Duel being in the 1962 Jonathan Small/Nathan Juran film Jack the Giant Killer (which shares with the Gordon film the depiction of a castle full of live-action freaks and monsters) between the sorceror Pendragon and the forces of the leprechaun.
Wizard’s Duels have become commonplace in novels and films – just look at the Harry Potter series, and Harry Dresden, and Dr. Strange in the MCU. But it was comparatively rare at the time these films were released , all in the space of a year or so. I don’t know what caused the phenomenon to precipitate at that moment. I certainly don’t recall cases of earlier depictions of wizard’s duels in cinema. Dr. Strange himself didn’t appear until mid-1963, and it’s been argued that his look was inspired by Vincent Price (and the character’s middle name is “Vincent”), and possibly the character himself might have ben inspired by The Raven.
I can’t recall many literary examples before those early 1960s films, either. Robert E, Howard sometimes had magical duels between characters, especially in his Conan stories, the most blatant examples being The Scarlet Citadel and The Hour of the Dragon, although they show up elsewhere, as in The Tower of the Elephant.
Tolkien has lots of magic, but most of his confrontations between magicians happen offstage, so we never get to see his council taking on The Necromancer, or even Gandalf fighting Saruman (you have to watch Peter Jackson’s movie for that). Gandalf in the books is more likely to use his sword, or to blast non-magical enemies with bolts of power. Even to get the Balrog off the Bridge he strikes the bridge, not the Balrog. Gandalf recalls his fight with the Balrog in very vague terms, and it seems to involve more fisticuffs than magic.
Curiously, the TV Tropes page on Wizard’s Duel doesn’t even list all the examples I have here, and for earlier examples only has two stories from “Myth and Religion”
Anybody know of earlier examples in film, pre-1960? Or notable efforts in literature prior to Howard? Otherwise, it looks as if our present infatuation with magic vs magic might be datable back to a handful of movies from the early 1960s.
