I Married a Witch (1942)

Fantastic!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I happened to watch two films close together in which I learned that the lead actors did not get along while filming, "I Married a Witch" and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." Both could be used as examples of what happens when movies with otherwise decent ingredients are hampered by a lack of chemistry between their actors.Of the two, "I Married a Witch" fares much better. It's a cute but pretty forgettable little comedy about a modern-day descendant (Fredric March) of a family patriarch who was cursed by a witch way back when and condemned to a legacy of bad marriages. March is scheduled to marry rich girl Susan Hayward but doesn't really want to. Luckily for him, a slinky little witch played by Veronica Lake reappears after an absence of a couple of hundred years to make mischief, notably by making March fall in love with her instead. Unluckily for him, the witch's father (Cecil Kellaway) also comes along and gets up to much meaner hijinks (like setting skyscrapers on fire), which include interfering when his daughter starts to develop feelings of her own for the man she's bewitched.Much is likable about the film, but little sparkles. Lake wasn't a great actress, but she could be quite winning and fetching under the right direction. Here she's allowed to be too languid, and what I think was supposed to pass for alluring comes off instead as a bit lifeless. March is good -- he was one of those rare actors who seemed as at home in comedies as dramas -- but the movie around him doesn't allow him much room to build a memorable performance. There isn't really anything egregiously wrong with "I Married a Witch," but there isn't anything to make me whole-heartedly recommend it either.Roy Webb received an Oscar nomination for Best Dramatic or Comedy Score back in the days when the average year found 15 to 20 titles nominated for that particular award.Grade: B

***SPOILERS*** The film that inspired the TV hit series "Bewitched"-Bewitched! Bewitched! you know that craft so well- some 25 years later stars the drop dead gorgeous blonde not yet out of her teens Veronia Lake as 270 year old Jennifer. It's Jennifer who together with her warlock dad Daniel,Cecil Kallaway, who came back to life with the help of a lighting strike to hunt the decedent of puritan Nathaniel Wooley, Fredric March, who condemned them both to death back in the 17th century for practicing witchcraft. Working together as a team Jennifer and her dad Daniel take aim at Nathaniel's great-to something like the 10th generation-grandson Jonathon Wooley also played by Fredic March who's expected to win the election for the state governor as well as planning to marry pretty red-head Estelle Masterson, Susan Hayward, the same evening as part of a double-header!With Jennifer suddenly coming on the scene with her making Johathon save her life in a hotel fire he ends up cooked with his both political and marriage lives in her taking control of them. Jennifer who at first tried to do everything possible to make Johathon's life miserable soon falls madly in love with the somewhat confused jerk who has no idea who she really is-A Witch-and what she and her dad Daniel have planned for him. Breaking up Jonathon's marriage plans was bad enough but leaving him out to hang just didn't quite work out as Jennifer planned. With her dad turning on her for not going through in destroying Jonathon's love life, by her falling in love with him, Jennifer also saves his political career by getting the entire state electorate-2,700,000 to 0-with her witchcraft to vote him into office!***SPOILERS***It's Jennifer's warlock dad Daniel who disapproved in her falling in love and marrying Johathon that was the last stepping stone for her to overcome and she did it by tricking him, who's a down and out drunk to begin with, to get himself lost in a bottle of bourbon and with Jennifer putting the cork down on it was never to bother them again. Veronica Lake started a whole new craze in hairstyles with her Peek-a-Boo look in the movie that it almost cost the war for the US against Nazi Germany and Emperial Japan. That with so many young women working in defense plants- With the men away fighting the war- producing war material having their hair caught in the machinery that she had to drastically change it-For patriotic reasons-in order to keep the war economy going.

This is Veronica Lake's best movie. She is the reason to watch this movie. It is a slower paced movie than today's comedies with a more subtle humor, sometime even a dry humor. I thought it was great. She is great. Veronica makes the movie , she is a great comedian, cuter than a button, and this is the best character she plays in her career. Talk about a great cast, Susan Hayward is hilarious as the bitchy fiancée. She is stunningly radiant in her opening scene in that white dress and both are a feast for the eyes.The scenes of the re-staging of the wedding gets funnier and funnier, the angrier that she and her dad become. Veronica has a "beauty shot" ( a shot set up perfectly, almost as a still portrait and many times an establishing shot of that actor in the film, like Rita Hayworth flinging her hair back in Gilda or John Wayne, when the camera pulls up to a close-up in Stagecoach), that is one of the best ever. Later she is in a dress that you can see through, may be worth it just for that, and she is tiny and adorable throughout. Robert Benchley is a great comedian to play off of Frederick March, and Frederick is downright dashing and perfect for the part. The maid and Veronica's father are so important, as great character actors are, and shine in the few scenes they do.This is one of the unknown great movies. Why it isn't as popular as, It happened One Night any Katherine Hepburn movie, or The Odd Couple type of movies is a mystery. Perhaps you may notice, that is the movies I will review to start, the great unknowns. Everyone knows about Gone with the Wind, Ben Hur, Casablanca etc... I hope my reviews can interest you enough to go see these lesser known films. This is one of them. Veronica's best and one of the best comedies of all time.

Delightfully off-the-wall comedy that whips up a bit of supernatural contrivance to skate fairly near the Hayes Code boundaries of the day. No wonder portraits of strait-laced puritans keep falling (literally) off the wall. Frederick March is a rising politician with no noticeable moral qualities on the verge of his wedding (to classy Susan Hayward) and an election, who is caught up in a series of increasingly compromising situations with a witch come back to take revenge on his ancestor, in the form of Veronica Lake. She subverts the melodrama of him rescuing her from a burning hotel with seductive come-ons. We know it's a set-up, in the papers it looks like a publicity stunt, and he himself suspects it's a frame-up by his political rivals. But the joke is he resists rather feebly. People don't just fall in love, he tells her. "Hmmm, guess this'll take longer than I planned" she muses. She spins the clock round several hours having got herself into his bed and his pyjamas, and dawn finds him still reasoning with her at the bedside. The Hayes Code kept him off the bed of course. But his heroic rescue has made the front pages, and when his PA says "What a break - you don't know what this young woman can do for you." he replies "Oh I've got a pretty good idea" with a glance up at the bedroom. Today's films can't do this stuff, we've lost the moralistic conventions to subvert, and the art of the knowing wink to the audience. But the plot skates along to the stuffy wedding, where we know something's gotta give, complicated by the fact that her love-potion has backfired and she's drunk it herself. Her roguish wizard father (Cecil Kellaway) materialises to keep the bedevilment going (as carried over into the 1960s TV spin off "Bewitched") and open scandal requires a bit of magic to conjure a light and fluffy ending out of the hat. It's the moral ambiguity of March's character in the subtext and the delightful send-up of the femme-fatale that give a sardonic noir edge to this felicitous comedy.