Fri 24 Apr 2009
BEWITCHED. MGM, 1945. Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, Henry H. Daniels Jr., Horace McNally, Addison Richards, Kathleen Lockhart, Minor Watson. Screenwriter & director: Arch Oboler, based on his story for radio, “Alter Ego,” starring Bette Davis.
Giving away the entire story line, but what can I do, this is probably the first film about dual or multiple personality disorder, well before either Lizzie (with Eleanor Parker), and The Three Faces of Eve (with Joanne Woodward) both of which came out in 1957, some twelve years later.
Phyllis Thaxter plays Joan Ellis in Bewitched, a slim young girl engaged to be married who hears voices in her head – or rather one other voice, that of “Karen” (an unbilled – and unseen, alas – Audrey Totter), and who runs away to New York City from her small town in the Midwest to escape it (or her, as the case may be).
But there, while possessed by Karen, she commits a murder, and it’s bang up to midnight on Death Row as an elderly but sage psychiatrist (Edmund Gwenn) tries to convince the governor that a pardon might be in order.
A couple of scenes suggest this movie might be called a film noir, although a minor one. The first in particular – a rainswept street with Joan huddled in an alleyway as she tries to escape the demon inside her – suggests there might be more to the movies than there turns out to be.
But double alas, no. Arch Oboler, noted for his work on early 1940s radio, primarily as a writer and producer for the famed horror series Lights Out, turned more and more heavy-handed as time went on, and the movie Bewitched is no exception.
Determined that a moral be raised and stated (if not overstated) in many of his later productions, Oboler manages to suck much (but not all) of the enjoyment out of what could have been a first rate thriller. Granted he was working on a budget, but none of the parts of this film seem to jell.
Nor should anyone come away from watching this film thinking that exorcising extra personalities from someone so afflicted can be as easy as talking to them sternly.
April 24th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
I liked Bewitched a little better than you, but all your points are valid, and it’s more an interesting failure than a minor success.
Obler did manage at least one tour de force on radio, a story about a giant chicken ravaging the countryside. It sounds silly, and probably would have looked worse, but on radio it built up to a nice chill or two — even while you chuckled at the idea.
Bewitched, like Obler’s sf film Five (1951) is more about promising than delivering. Then too, Five seems to have been lifted from Philip Wylie’s novel Triumph, or at least awfully close to it. Still, Bewitched gets pride of place as the first film to officially use the multiple personality in film as far as I know.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Lots of ambition on display here, even though it doesn’t really pay off. Still, I was impressed enough with Oboler’s efforts on a tight budget that I recorded his anti-TV satire The Twonky the following week. This was a terrible mistake.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
After locating some stills from The Twonky and reading some comments sent my way by fine, intrepid people like you, Vince, I haven’t built up enough nerve and/or fortitude to sit down and watch it myself. Not yet, say I.
— Steve
April 26th, 2009 at 1:42 am
The Twonky is one of those legendary films that really disappoints, especially if you’ve read the almost ecstatic reviews you encounter some places. Lower you expectations and there is a bit of fairly gentle satire about television though unintentionally ironic considering how important the small screen was to Hans Conried’s career, and that Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, whose story it is based on (almost anything in this era by Kuttner was also by Moore), later wrote teleplays for many of the Warner Brothers series.