I Married a Witch Reviews

I Married a Witch is pure 1940s screwball no matter the amount of occult drapery that has been added to adorn the edges. It boils down to the major tropes of the genre: mistaken identities, a loopy yet dominating female presence romancing more subservient male presence, farcical sight gags and numerous physical comedy bits. It’s the kind of light-weight charm that movies nowadays never seem to possess, perhaps because something like this has been deemed too old-fashioned.

I Married a Witch opens with a title card telling us that we’re being placed into a world that exists in a fairy tale like state, essentially beginning the movie with a title that reads “Once upon a time…” in spirit more so than the actual words. It then goes on to deliver a series of sight-gags and running jokes that clearly draw a line from here to the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of Rocky and Bullwinkle to the diminishing returns of the Shrek franchise. For a film made in 1942, there’s a surprising amount of “current” and “modern” humor involved in the whole thing.

And the film works best when it just sits back and lets Veronica Lake charm, scheme, seduce and prove the enigmatic allure of a golden peek-a-boo bang. Witch would've sunk or swam depending on Lake’s performance, and she proves herself to be a highly gifted comic actress, steering the film into pure escapist whimsy. The plot, which is pretty much laid out in the title, is more like bits of plumbing laid down to allow for her central, life-giving performance to flow through the various humorous bits and pieces.

The only major problem occurs in the last act of the film in which the writers randomly decided that the film needed a big bad to overcome. And while Cecil Kellaway is a funny, naughty warlock, his transformation into a revenge-seeking sprite isn’t entirely necessary. The whole movie was built upon the screwball principles of two characters from opposite sides falling for each other while zany antics whiz past them. The introduction, especially so late in the game, of a villainous character proves more distracting than anything.

Yet I Married a Witch still charmed the pants off of me. I smiled and giggled the whole time. I’d never seen Lake in anything outside of Sullivan’s Travels and thought she always played that kind of tough-talking pixie girl, so it was a pleasant surprise to see her here let loose and deliver a more flirty and fun performance. Truth be told, it’s really got no right to be even remotely good given how loony the premise of it is, but with a brisk pace and only 75 minutes, a strong cast and some smart jokes, Witch has to be some kind of minor screwball classic.