evanston_dad 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

lasttimeisaw Served as French film pyrotechnist René Clair's second Hollywood venture when he was a hired- hand by the studios, I MARRIED A WITCH cashes in on a light-hearted script about witchcraft and head-over-heels romance, and headlined by a 20-year-old Veronica Lake (in her iconic peekaboo coiffure) and a visibly too-old-for-the-bachelor-role Fredric March.The fatuous story develops around a witch Jennifer (Lake), after miraculously awaken by a thunder striking the oak tree where she and her sorcerer father Daniel (Kellaway) were burned centuries ago, now is frivolously bent on seeking revenge from Wallace Wooley (March), the descendant of her denouncer in Salem, by seducing the latter into marry her, so that she can break his heart. But under the premise is that Wooley's family has been already inflicted by her curse that all descendants will marry the wrong woman, so their marriages have been destined for unhappiness, which only makes her punishment gratuitous.Anyway, things don't go exactly as Jennifer plans, for one thing, she accidentally drinks the philter which prepares for Wallace and gets all smitten with him instead. However, as the throwaway catchword is "love over witchery", which would been unsubtly addressed multiple times in the course of the farce, the writers (including an uncredited Dalton Trumbo as the contributing writer) seem oblivious enough to unleash her under the spell, so eventually when they reach that banal happy ending, it awkwardly sends out a mixed message in aftermath.The cast is serviceable at its best, there is a pleasant and even childlike guilelessness in Veronica Lake's cheerful insouciance, radiates from her vintage glamour out of her petite figure, a starlet made from Tinseltown banks on her looks rather than her acting range, while Oscar-winning leading man Fredric March self-consciously settles for a perpetual innocuous bewilderment, to audience's amusement, only Cecil Kellaway is whimsically glinting with a certain degree of unpredictability to make the plot thicken. Finally, it is downright offensive to see Susan Hayward is cast in a thankless role as Wallace's petulant bride-to-be Estelle, plays a second fiddler to a star far less talented than her.An utterly harmless fluff notwithstanding, the picture at least dazzles with its dexterity of handling with its fantasy tropes, two wisps of smoke represents the amorphous Jennifer and Daniel and a set piece of a flying taxi using matte legerdemain must have been quite an engrossing technique to woo its audience upon its release, a credit certainly should be attributed to Mr. Clair himself.

Alex da Silva Burnt as a witch, Veronica Lake (Jennifer) and her father Cecil Kellaway (Daniel) put a curse on Fredric March (Wooley) and his descendants so that they will always be unlucky in love. The film concentrates on the present day as March is seeking election to office and is about to be married to his financial backer's daughter Susan Hayward (Estelle). However, the spirits of Lake and Kellaway assume human forms and start to cause trouble… The film is amusing and entertaining. It takes us through humorous scenes and ends on a funny note as Lake and March spend way too much time together. The supporting cast are excellent and the film's short length means it zips by. It's funny that the witch is called Jennifer as that is my wife's name. It's all unrealistic nonsense but this allows you to focus totally on the comedy without being sidetracked by a secondary serious plot.

wes-139 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.