I Married a Witch
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List Price: $14.98
Features
• Black & White
• Color
• HiFi Sound
• NTSC
In Theaters : 30 October, 1942
Video Release : 27 January, 1993 |
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I Married a Witch Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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Father and Daughter
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Cecil Kellaway makes I MARRIED A WITCH a scary film indeed, and I suspect that John Huston must have recalled Kellaway's portrayal when he undertook the role of the evil, incest-driven patriarch in Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN. Against all odds, Kellaway has kept his daughter to himself for 270 years, thanks to the Puritans who have condemned him to live, as a ghost, in the form of smoke, under a giant oak tree on the ancestral property of the Wooley family. And in turn Kellaway has cursed the Wooleys, ensuring that, in each generation, no man shall find happiness in love, all will be married to plain battleaxes.
Meanwhile Daniel (the warlock played by Kellaway) had Jennifer (his lovely daughter, played by the uniquely talented Veronica Lake) right where he wants her--he's the only man in her universe. When a lightning storm topples the tree, releasing father and daughter, it spells trouble for Daniel who risks losing the undivided love of his daughter, as, like Miranda in THE TEMPEST, she discovers a brave new world of cute guys and sort of begins to neglect dear old Dad. Daniel's fury is right out of the Chinatown playbook, and he tries everything he knows to break up Jennifer and her new love interest, Wallace Wooley (Fredric March, looking pretty dumpy only a few years after his killer sex appeal in the Wellman version of A STAR IS BORN).
Some will love Veronica Lake, some will be puzzled, but everyone must admit that in her early scenes, before love makes her more "human," she makes some of the oddest acting choices ever captured on film (Surrealist or otherwise). She employs a squeaky, oltrano voice, as though entrapment in an oak tree for centuries has blanched away her voice to mere oxygen. In her memoir, Lake told the story of how French director Rene Clair directed her from moment to moment, coaching and acting out her every phrase and expression, every mincing step. It is a performance more in bits and pieces than a whole, but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Readers of VERONICA, Lake's memoir, will also recall that she got tired of Freddie March always feeling her up during their scenes together and she arranged a rocking chair scene in which she managed to steer the rocker part right into his most vulnerable area. See if you can spot it in the finished film and look for his momentary expression of ghastly testicular pain. |
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