I Married a Witch

 René Clair’s I Married a Witch (1942) belongs to that rarefied category of films which appear almost feather-light upon first encounter, yet acquire an increasingly seductive complexity the longer one lingers over them. Part supernatural fantasy, part screwball romance, part satire of marriage and political respectability, and part unabashed star vehicle for Veronica Lake, the film is an agreeably eccentric confection whose charms lie less in the intricacies of its plot than in the elegance, wit and sheer mischievousness with which it deploys them. Adapted from Thorne Smith’s unfinished novel The Passionate Witch, and directed by the distinguished French filmmaker René Clair, the film brings Lake and Fredric March together, with Cecil Kellaway, Susan Hayward and Robert Benchley lending invaluable support. At a brisk 77 minutes, it wastes little cinematic oxygen before plunging its audience into an improbable world of witchcraft, romance, political ambition, slapstick and visual enchantment.

The premise is, appropriately enough, deliciously preposterous. In seventeenth-century New England, Jennifer, a beautiful young witch, and her father Daniel are condemned to death by the Puritan Jonathan Wooley. As she faces execution, Jennifer retaliates by placing a curse upon the Wooley family: henceforth, none of its male descendants shall discover matrimonial felicity. The curse proceeds to afflict successive generations of Wooleys, all incarnated by Fredric March in a wonderfully economical comic montage, before the supernatural reasserts itself centuries later. Lightning strikes the tree beneath which Jennifer and Daniel’s spirits have been imprisoned, liberating them into the modern world. Jennifer promptly discovers that the latest Wooley descendant, Wallace Wooley, is a politician poised to marry Estelle Masterson, a woman whose social ambition and imperious temperament make the prospective union appear sufficiently unfortunate even before supernatural intervention enters the equation. Jennifer, naturally, decides that the most delicious form of revenge would be to destroy Wallace’s marriage.

What makes this ludicrous premise work is Clair’s refusal to invest it with anything resembling solemnity. I Married a Witch understands that its principal comic conceit resides in the collision between the archaic absurdities of supernatural mythology and the altogether more mundane absurdities of modern American existence. Jennifer has waited several centuries to avenge herself upon the Wooley lineage, only to discover that her latest adversary is a buttoned-up politician preoccupied with elections, public appearances and the conventions of respectable marriage. Wallace, for his part, is scarcely a romantic ideal: earnest, conventional and politically ambitious, he is already ensnared in an engagement whose emotional prospects seem distinctly less promising than its social credentials. The supernatural thus becomes less an intrusion upon civilisation than a wonderfully efficient instrument for exposing the absurdity that civilisation already contains.

The film’s greatest enchantment, however, is Veronica Lake. Jennifer is no conventional witch, and Lake makes no attempt to render her one. She is mischievous, capricious, vain, seductive, petulant and occasionally downright wicked, but never genuinely sinister. There is an almost feline playfulness in the performance, a sense that Jennifer is perpetually amused by the solemnity with which mortals conduct their affairs. Lake can transform herself from seductive enchantress to spoilt child to gleeful troublemaker within the space of a few seconds, and the film acquires an unmistakable buoyancy whenever she enters the frame.

Clair exploits Lake’s ethereal screen presence with considerable ingenuity. Jennifer may be physically present one moment and reduced to a disembodied voice, a wisp of smoke or an apparition the next. The spirits emerging from their imprisonment, Jennifer’s supernatural manifestations, the magical disturbances surrounding Wallace’s wedding and the various visual interventions of witchcraft are not treated as opportunities for technical exhibitionism; they are organically incorporated into the comedy. The effects exist not merely to astonish but to amuse, thereby preserving the film’s delicate equilibrium between fantasy and farce.

Fredric March provides an admirably contrasting presence. His Wallace Wooley is almost aggressively conventional: earnest, respectable, politically ambitious and determined to preserve an appearance of propriety even as his carefully regulated existence collapses around him. March understands that the character’s comic potential lies precisely in his inability to comprehend the anarchic force that has invaded his life. Against Lake’s mercurial sensuality and supernatural caprice, March supplies the requisite ballast, and their contrasting energies generate much of the film’s comic electricity.

Indeed, the relationship between Lake and March is considerably more persuasive as a comic duel than as a conventional romance. Jennifer initially regards Wallace merely as the latest object of her hereditary vendetta, while Wallace sees her as an inexplicable and deeply inconvenient disruption to his meticulously organised existence. Their mutual attraction gradually complicates this antagonism, transforming revenge into emotional vulnerability. Yet the romantic dimension is never quite as convincing as the comedy. Fortunately, Clair appears less interested in manufacturing a grand love story than in observing what happens when two utterly incompatible temperaments are compelled into each other’s orbit.

Susan Hayward is particularly effective as Estelle, Wallace’s fiancée. The role could easily have descended into caricature, reducing her to the obligatory shrill obstacle between hero and heroine. Hayward, however, invests Estelle with sufficient self-regard, social calculation and imperiousness to make her a credible embodiment of the respectable world Jennifer seeks to destabilise. There is, moreover, a recurring joke here that the film exploits with considerable relish: the supposedly civilised realm of marriage, politics and social status frequently proves more irrational than the supernatural universe inhabited by Jennifer.

Cecil Kellaway nearly steals the film as Daniel, Jennifer’s father. Whereas Jennifer is driven by sensuality, revenge and impulsive mischief, Daniel appears considerably more interested in alcohol, amusement and the simple pleasures of being restored to earthly existence. Kellaway’s immaculate comic timing lends the proceedings an additional layer of eccentricity. Robert Benchley, as Wallace’s friend Dr. Dudley White, supplies the requisite deadpan counterpoint, ensuring that the film never becomes merely a two-person exhibition for Lake and March.

Clair’s direction remains one of the film’s most underappreciated virtues. His touch is light, whimsical and deliberately unhurried in spirit even when the narrative itself moves rapidly. He does not continually bludgeon the audience with jokes; instead, he often permits situations to generate their own absurdity. This restraint is crucial. The comedy derives not merely from punchlines but from the incongruity of the circumstances themselves: a seventeenth-century witch pursuing a twentieth-century politician, a politician attempting to maintain electoral respectability while being haunted by supernatural forces, and a prospective marriage becoming the battlefield upon which centuries-old vengeance is finally played out.

Ted Tetzlaff’s black-and-white cinematography complements Clair’s sensibility beautifully. Shadows, smoke, silhouettes and carefully modulated studio lighting give the supernatural sequences an oneiric quality, while the more conventional domestic scenes possess the brighter visual grammar of a romantic comedy. The distinction subtly establishes Jennifer as a creature who belongs simultaneously to two realms: she has entered Wallace’s ordinary world, but she remains defiantly ungoverned by its conventions.

The film’s brevity is another of its considerable virtues. The narrative moves with admirable economy from the witch-burning prologue to the family curse, Jennifer’s resurrection, Wallace’s engagement and the progressively complicated consequences of her intervention. There is very little narrative fat. One supernatural calamity follows another, yet Clair rarely permits a gag or situation to outstay its welcome. The result is a film whose very lightness becomes part of its charm.

Beneath its frivolous exterior, however, I Married a Witch contains an unexpectedly subversive conception of its heroine. Jennifer is not simply another domineering woman destined to become another comic wife. She possesses supernatural power, sexual confidence and a complete indifference to the social codes that regulate everyone around her. She enters Wallace’s life not because she requires him but because she has selected him as the object of her vengeance. Yet the joke ultimately turns upon Jennifer herself: revenge gives way to affection, and the woman who initially intends to destroy Wallace discovers that genuine emotion has rendered her vulnerable.

The political dimension of the film adds another layer to its satire. Wallace is a gubernatorial candidate whose carefully cultivated public persona becomes increasingly difficult to sustain as Jennifer introduces supernatural chaos into his life. There is a particularly delicious irony in the manner in which Jennifer’s interference paradoxically helps Wallace secure electoral success, despite his inability to conduct a conventional campaign and his mounting problems of public image. Clair thus gently skewers the peculiar relationship between political respectability and private desire. Wallace’s public persona depends upon his appearing rational, disciplined and morally upright; Jennifer embodies precisely those impulses that cannot be disciplined. His predicament is consequently both romantic and political: the supernatural threatens not merely his engagement but the carefully constructed fiction upon which his public identity rests.

The film’s irreverence extends even further. Puritanism, political ambition, marriage, social respectability and the supposedly immutable boundary between life and death are all treated as conventions awaiting disruption by a mischievous woman with magical powers and an almost supernatural ability to appear precisely where she is least wanted. Jennifer is consequently less a traditional antagonist than an emissary of comic anarchy. She does not so much destroy order as reveal how precarious, artificial and faintly ridiculous that order has always been.

What ultimately makes I Married a Witch endure, however, is not its plot, which is intentionally flimsy, nor its romance, which is more persuasive as comic antagonism than as passionate attachment. Its true attraction lies in its atmosphere: Clair’s graceful direction, Tetzlaff’s atmospheric photography, the ingenious visual effects, the brisk comic rhythm, the eccentric supporting performances and, above all, the extraordinary screen presence of Veronica Lake.

Lake is, quite literally, the film’s magical ingredient. Her performance is sensual without becoming ponderous, mischievous without becoming exhausting, and comic without sacrificing the glamorous persona that made her such an indelible screen presence. She transforms Jennifer into a woman who appears perpetually entertained by the foolishness of mortals. Even when the screenplay occasionally retreats into formula, Lake’s voice, expressions, timing and physical presence keep the film airborne.

I Married a Witch is therefore best appreciated not as a flawless romantic comedy but as an unusually charming cinematic hybrid: part supernatural fantasy, part screwball comedy, part political satire and part star vehicle. Its virtues are manifold — René Clair’s graceful directorial touch, Ted Tetzlaff’s evocative photography, inventive effects, a remarkably assured supporting cast and, most significantly, Veronica Lake at the height of her enchantment.

More than eight decades after its release, the film retains a peculiar freshness because it never takes itself seriously enough to become dated. It neither seeks to frighten nor burdens itself with the elaborate mythology that would later become characteristic of supernatural cinema. Instead, it takes the simplest of premises — a witch returning from the dead to torment the descendant of the man responsible for her death — and converts it into a playful meditation upon love, marriage, politics, respectability and the enduring foolishness of human beings. Its magic, in the final reckoning, has surprisingly little to do with witchcraft. It resides instead in the film’s wit, elegance, economy and, above all, in the irresistible cinematic sorcery of Veronica Lake.