Above and below are two posters for Bewitched, a movie we decided to watch because its title stood out when we saw it. Why? Well, we’re still watching the entire run of television’s Bewitched. Could this be about the supernatural, we wondered? If that sounds silly, remember, we try not to read synopses of these movies. It’s just better, if possible, to go in knowing little or nothing. Obviously, we already know generally about all the more popular films we haven’t yet seen, but this one is obscure.
Turns out it’s a no-budget melodrama, written and directed by Arch Oboler, about poor Phyllis Thaxter, who suffers from a split personality, or more accurately a histrionic form of cinematic schizophrenia, that sees her taken over by an evil alter ego. This mental invader is named Karen, and she’a a bitch. She forces Joan to commit murder. We thought: Wait—if Joan is imprisoned or executed what does Karen get out of it? Well, Oboler tries to finesse that by suggesting Karen knows Joan will be acquitted because she/they look innocent and an all-male jury will think she’s too pretty to kill. Okay.
Joan has never told anyone that she hears an evil voice. She doesn’t break the pattern at trial, refusing to take the stand in her own defense. It looks bad, but surprise—that scheming Karen is right. But the moment the jury is about announce an acquittal, Joan realizes that if she’s freed her evil side will make her do more bad things, so she stands up and screams: “Stop! I did it! I killed him! I’m guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” And… dissolve.
She ends up on death row. But a mere five hours before she’s due to ride old sparky, she finally admits to her lawyer that she has a split personality, and the wheels of deus ex machina lurch into motion. It’s as cheesy as it sounds. There’s really nothing in the film but a good example of what a b-feature was like during the mid-century era. Sloppy. Slapdash. A baritone voiceover brackets the film, and though it’s meant to hammer the movie’s point home for viewers, there really is no point. None at all. Bewitched premiered in the U.S. today in 1945.
Do I want to stab my fiancée? Or maybe it’s too harsh a method for breaking an engagement.
In the end, I guess it was really more of a rhetorical question.
