One of the most delightful of the American light farce film-genre of the late 1930s-early 1940s known as the Screwball Comedy- as well as (excepting The Wizard of Oz) the most significant American film-treatment of Witches until that time- is 1942′s I Married A Witch. Starring ’40s Screen Siren Veronica Lake and accomplished stage-and-screen actor (and really good light comedian) Fredric March, the film is certainly a shoo-in for the “Pagan Film Classics Night” once the Pagan Television Network is up and running: in the meantime, it is a delicious Must for Pagan Film-Scholars wishing to understand The Portrayal of Witches On Film as a cinematic expertise. (It is also showing on Hulu.com, available for convenient viewing.)
A caveat: we are currently living in a Revisionist Era of Witchcraft-Study, so we consider such things as Media Treatment of Witches differently than, say, Hollywood did, in (say) the last Glam Days of Old Hollywood (the early ’40s, before America entered the War). Witches, in this film, are on the face of it “Evil.” The film opens upon the Classic American Witch-Story (Puritan Salem), with the Burning of These Two Evil Witches (Veronica Lake and her Sorcerer-Father). Immediate first-thing: Witches (of course) were not burned at Salem (they were hung). The Witch-Trials of Salem was actually not a subject that people had researched well by the early 1940s (holding such things as American Witch-Trials to be kind of embarrassingly quaint), so the supposition that Witches had been burned might not have seemed out-of-the-question for Hollywood at the time. Now we know better, so we can judge that I Married A Witch opens with an anachronism.
And it opens with the Burning of two Evil Witches by Puritans (with a really sharp Screwball Comedy satiric touch, of a vender working the crowd with snacks and souvenirs). The two Witches (Veronica Lake and her Sorcerer-Father) return in the “present-day” as disembodied forms of “Witch-Smoke”: anticipating gleefully the plagues and torments that (being Witches in the early ’40s) they intend to inflict upon Humankind. If one can kind of get past that, however, and embrace the idea that these two Witches (as revenge upon the Witch-Hunter who denounced them) have cursed that man’s family with misery in love (leading to a very funny montage of the descendants of this man knowing misery in love): one can really enjoy this delightfully daft flick.
Part of what makes it work is that the Witches are not genuinely Evil so much as kind of prankster-ish. Veronica Lake is more endearing as a Witch than anything else (as well as an interestingly tomboyish one); her undeniable Femme Fatale allure is directed firmly towards the acquisition of her love (Fredric March); and the Screwball mistakes that she makes in the process are no more than the emblems of Screwball Comedy’s premise, that The Course of True Love Did Ne’er Run Smooth.
Interesting Signifiers of Witchcraft abound: the film opens (“Long, long ago, when people still believed in Witches,” ahem) with a Puritan condemning all “Witches, Warlocks, and Sorcerers”- demonstrating that in 1942, “Warlock” was seen as the male equivalent to a Witch; there are witty sequences involving Witches’ flying implements such as brooms, and (in a pre-Harry Potter instance) a flying car; the Witches are heavily associated with fire, smoke, and storms; there is a wonderful scene of Ms. Lake charming a Love Potion in a cauldron bubbling over a fire; I love the cloak with a peaked hood that they put her in at the end; the Colonial New England ambiance throughout is really fun, as is the sight-gag ending with Ms. Lake and Mr. March married, the parents of two boys- and a girl who wears her hair in Ms. Lake’s signature over-one-eye peekaboo, while she gallops around on a broom.
I Married A Witch contributed to the inspiration of Bewitched, and one can see the various elements borrowed: there is the Witch so in love with a Mortal that she marries him (even replicating the marital-night confession of Witchcraft); the Witch-Relatives and the confusions that they cause; the Witch-Relatives who can’t quite get their Magicks right, as well as the slightly vindictive Witch-Relatives; and the settling down at the end, to raise a kind-of unconventional Witch-Mortal family.
IMAW seems so much like a Veronica Lake vehicle, it looks as if it must have been created for her; as with most Witch-flicks, this credit tends to stand out on her resume. In the manner of the Screwball Comedy, it is primarily about women and men falling in love (well, in this case, Witches and men); its presentation of romance, unlike our own hyper-sexualized era, is subtle, restrained, and dignified. Its overall mood is boisterous and fun-loving; the definitive Golden Age Hollywood Witch-Screwball Comedy classic, and a Pagan film-treat.
Thinking about it, they may well have gotten that I Dream of Jeanie thing whereby she turns into smoke and lives in a bottle, from IMAW, as the Witches here both “live” as smoke and hide in bottles. It is interesting how supernatural the Witches are, being first smoky essences before conjuring corporeal bodies. The romance between Ms. Lake and Mr. March is something of a reincarnation myth, hence the use of smoky, worlds-between-worlds atmosphere that marks their pivotal scenes: an interesting subtext is the healing of injustices across generations, as the Yankee Witch put to death by Puritans and the descendant of these Puritans heal the past by falling in love two hundred years later.
There’s some really interesting things going on in this movie.
Somewhere in my piles of books, I have an old copy of the novel it was supposedly based on. I can barely remember having seen this film many years ago.
But I do remember enough to be able to state that they re-wrote the story a great deal for the sake of their contract-system’s star’s careers.
Hey Ananta- (1) as a Pagan Witch who (like I am sure, many another Reader here at the Juggler) has amassed a huge collection of books, including many treasures of the Old Magick Past, (2) I so admire your archival instinct in collecting this antique novel (with, I gather, an eye towards its significance). (3) Thank you for your feed-back upon this Witch-story’s origin (I couldn’t figure out, was it an original project, or what, from its Wikipedia entry, so I suspect it is such an obscure point by now, the provence of this kind of obsolete- to anyone not a Witch or Pagan- ’40s movie, that few are in a position to say). (4) Making it all the more significant that you apparently possess a copy of the novel upon which this screen treatment was based.
On the PTN, this would all be interesting material in presenting this movie.
(5) Yes, Golden Age Hollywood could be kind of ruthless in its acquisition of material for its studio stars, could it not? A favorite example of mine, is that Louis B. Mayer PASSED on Gone With The Wind: he was considering it as a vehicle for MGM starlet JOAN CRAWFORD: (let’s all stop to imagine Mommie Dearest as Scarlet O’Hara), and another is that The Wizard of Oz was thought of as a Shirley Temple flick.
The interesting thing about the American Myth-Making Days of Old Hollywood (because they did Make Myths in those days) is that sometimes, the Zeitgeist would say, No, you have to wait for Vivien Leigh or Judy Garland.
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