René Clair (1942)

Not as entertaining as it should be.   In seventeenth-century New England, a warlock and his witch daughter are burned at the stake by a Puritan called Jonathan Wooley – who admits to his mother there was a moment, in the hayloft, when he found himself falling for the charms (physical rather than supernatural) of the daughter, whose name was Jennifer.   The witches’ ashes are buried under a tree to imprison their evil spirits but the curse they pronounce on the Wooley family – that its men will always be doomed to marry the wrong woman – is enduringly effective.   Jonathan Wooley and all his male heirs are played by Fredric March; a brisk trot through the centuries, illustrating their unhappy marriages, is amusing thanks to March’s easy versatility and repertory company spirit.

Once the story arrives in the present day, though, the movie turns into something that’s more frantic than funny.   March plays a rising politician, Wallace Wooley, who’s standing for election as governor.  The main action takes place on the eve of the election and of Wallace’s wedding to Estelle Masterson, the latest shrew bride in the long-running Wooley tradition – she’s the spoiled, bossy daughter of Wallace’s chief political backer.  When lightning strikes the tree they were buried under, the spirits of Jennifer and her father Daniel are released.  Daniel materialises as Cecil Kellaway, Jennifer as Veronica Lake:  she naturally proves a sore temptation to Wallace Wooley but Jennifer finds herself falling for him too.  It’s a really good idea but René Clair, directing his second Hollywood movie, spends too much time on droll ghostly special effects; and, while you might not expect a comic romantic fantasy of this kind to be rigorously consistent, the magical powers of Jennifer and Daniel come and go so often that I Married a Witch gets a bit irritating.  So does Cecil Kellaway’s roguish theatricality as the warlock:  when Daniel spends a night in a prison cell and his neighbours complain they’ve not had a minute’s sleep and tell him to shut up, you sympathise.  Still, Veronica Lake is appealing, if not particularly varied, as Jennifer; and March, although even he struggles to find new things to do by the second half, gives Wallace Wooley an ardent exasperation which is very likeable.  (He also does a couple of nice double takes.)   With Susan Hayward as Estelle, Robert Warwick as her father, Robert Benchley as Wallace’s friend and Elizabeth Patterson as his housekeeper.   The screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly is based on an unfinished novel by Thorne Smith, ‘completed’ by Norman H Matson.

24 January 2014