OVP: I Married a Witch (1942)

Film: I Married a Witch (1942)
Stars: Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway, Susan Hayward
Director: Rene Clair
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

With the Oscar Viewing Project, I do find that I am slowly but steadily losing my "viewing virginity" with a number of classic film stars that I had apparently never gotten around to watching, and that includes Veronica Lake.  Lake was a movie star for Paramount in the 1940's and while her most famous role remains Sullivan's Travels (still need to see that) she's probably better known today for being Kim Basinger's doppelganger in LA Confidential and for being one of the movie stars that ended up inspiring Jessica Rabbit. Like several other actors of her era (Betty Hutton, for example) Lake ended up having a weirdly compelling real life story, becoming one of Marlon Brando's many lovers and like Hutton eventually became a waitress when she had burned through all of her money.  She eventually ended up dying at age 50 of hepatitis.  This is an (albeit sad) interesting story.  Unfortunately for me, I Married a Witch is not.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Jennifer (Lake) and her father Daniel (Kellaway) who are burned alive during the Salem Witch Trials, but not before putting an evil curse on the Wooley men who accused the two, dooming the men to always end up marrying shrewish, cruel women.  We come back to the present (well, 1942) and the current Wallace Wooley (March) is about to get married and is on-track to become the next governor of Massachusetts.  His fiance Estelle (a young Susan Hayward) is constantly berating him and clearly only marrying him because her father is making her.

After lighting strikes the tree that Jennifer and Daniel have been hiding in, Jennifer plots to take revenge on the present Wooley by making him fall-in-love with her, ruining his life by showing him something that he can't have.  Unfortunately, she accidentally drinks the love potion and ends up falling in love with him.  The rest of the movie is a series of mishaps, with Wallace slowly falling for Jennifer but her father Daniel is constantly trying to keep them apart in a variety of ways (including a morbid suicide scene where he wants to send Wallace to the electric chair, and another scene where Jennifer fakes her own death).

The film courts macabre humor with more abandon than you would expect. I don't know if it's because I've been more sensitized to such things through the years, but you'd never be able to make a picture like this where a main character is so cavalier about ruining someone's life through sexual blackmail and murder (at least not and call it a comedy afterwards).  The film's side characters are all a bit stock for me.  I get that Hayward, for example, is playing a cartoon, but did she have to be such a harpy (the film's words, not mine)?  It gives little indication why Wallace, who is an affable enough chap, would have sold out so ferociously as to marry her just for a higher office he throws away rather cavalierly later in the picture.

That lack of reason may be the film's biggest problem.  The movie occasionally has Wallace falling in love with Jennifer through magic, but that's only fleeting.  The film relies heavily on Wallace actually falling in love with her, and there's really no reason he would outside of looks, which makes him a pretty horrible protagonist.  This is because Jennifer is a truly vapid and awful human being.  The film wants her desperately to be Susan Vance from Bringing Up Baby, or perhaps even an early incarnation Samantha Stephens, but Susan and Sam were both insanely likable.  Yes, they had their flaws, but you still wanted to love them.  Jennifer is constantly trying to ruin Wallace's life for her own selfish gains, and the school girl/naive aspect of her persona border on the creepy.  Lake is indeed beautiful in the role, but she adds nothing to it and if this is what she brings to a film, I can see why she never graduated into iconic status like Rita Hayworth or Lauren Bacall did as her peers.

The film received one nomination, one of those countless nominations for Best Score that emerged during this period.  I have to say that while it's cute, and would indeed eventually inspire Bewitched, there's nothing particularly excellent about it-it's just a playful little score.

Those are my thoughts-anyone want to disagree with me?  Has anyone out there seen I Married a Witch, and if so what did you think?  For those that haven't, is there a Veronica Lake performance I should look for to wash the stench off of this one?  Share your thoughts in the comments!