Overlooked Movies: I Married a Witch

This movie was featured on Trailers from Hell a while back, and the mere mention of it sent me into a veritable frenzy of nostalgia.  When I was but a child (I don't remember the year) we went to San Antonio to visit my aunt Ellen, who lived in an apartment in the Calcasieu Building.  That in itself was quite an experience, as I'd never been in an apartment building before, and of course being in the midst of a big city was a real thrill.  I believe this was also the time of year of the Battle of the Flowers parade, which has been going on since the late 19th century.  The parade passed along the street right below the apartment window.  This trip was just thrill after thrill.

But what I remember more clearly than anything was that this trip was my first real contact with television.  My aunt and her roommate had a TV set, a very small one, to be sure, but a TV set nevertheless.  Because of the situation with beds and such, I was left to sleep on a pallet on the living room floor, which was fine with me because it left me alone in the room with the TV set.  On the night I remember, there was a movie on TV, and that movie was I Married a Witch.  The reception was lousy (You whippersnappers can't remember a time when you got anything but perfect pictures on TV, but, trust me, back in the olden days we were sometimes lucky to get a picture at all), but the lousy reception didn't bother me in the least.  There was a movie.  On a little box in the room where I was supposed to be sleeping.  It was like a miracle.

And besides all that, the movie might very well have been aimed right at me.  A fantasy about a beautiful witch?  What more could you ask, especially since the witch was played by Veronica Lake, with whom I promptly feel in love.  (I was terribly disappointed to learn from Joe Dante's commentary on the trailer that Fredric March couldn't stand Lake and that Joel McCrea disliked her so much after Sullivan's Travels that he turned down the role that March accepted.)  Susan Hayward is in the movie, too, but she's not a patch on Veronica Lake.

The movie has a complicated plot that I won't bother describing other than to say that if you ever see an episode of Bewitched, it was probably a direct steal from this movie.  Except that the movie is a lot better.  I mean, Endora is okay, but I Married a Witch has Cecil Kellaway, who's great.  If you like light fantasy and if you get a chance to see this one, I highly recommend it.