TWO-THIRDS of the way along in René Clair’s “I Married a Witch” nothing of much moment has happened—it is half-hearted, slick Clair bounded by a Thorne Smith story. Two witches have cursed all Wooley marriages because of a witch-burning in Salem in 1690. (Historical note: Witches were hanged, not burned.) The successive generations of Wooley have been flashed back—failures. Fredric March has been wooden, Veronica Lake has threatened to take off all her clothes, and Robert Benchley has done his usual. Comes a modern election day with a Wooley running for Governor, and Veronica Witch, as a bit of smoke, passes through the voters’ minds, changing them all to Wooley supporters. Bands play for him, babies cry “Wooley!” Madison Square Garden goes crazy, Wooley wins—2,684,922 to 0. (Even the rival candidate didn’t want to vote for himself.)
The pace and sustained humor in this latter passage are the picture’s saving grace. There are, to be sure, some small niceties that indicate M. Clair: a new variety of sophisticated pratt fall, the reaction to waffles of a woman who has been dead for 252 years, what two witches look like riding on one broomstick, what smoke sounds like on entering a bottle, and so on, mostly in dialogue.
What happened—because, including me, a lot of people liked René Clair at least up to his surrender in “The Ghost Goes West”—to René Clair? Mostly there is laziness through the whole production. Clair showed the story the easiest way he knew how—being in Hollywood. The photography is glossy, the settings elegant fallacy and the people millionaires. Nor does Clair try to make you laugh out loud, nor is he unduly original. The great society wedding which goes awry while Miss Van Horseface sings “I Love You Truly” is very familiar. So is Robert Benchley and the bedroom humor. An artist like Clair, who loves to comment on sex as much as anything, is restrained dreadfully by our puritan ideas, and reduced to dabbling—Racy Dialogue. This second American effort of Clair’s is no different from the initial performances of most foreign directors in that the treatment of American people and customs seems to be confined to what Hollywood showed them, plus the most notorious Americana: graft at the polls, political bosses, etc.
The laziness of the direction is most evident in the playing. Fredric March looks as if he were rehearsing the part for the first time, contrary to the unrehearsed Pierres and Alberts of Clair’s French films. Cecil Kellaway looks more like a director’s prank than a witch—a disheveled, gray-haired business man. Miss Lake, on the other hand, makes the turn from fantasy to real without leaving a question in your mind. She uses her mellophone voice well, and gets plenty of chance to. Noteworthy are two unidentifiable jailbirds who make much of small chores.
Hollywood comedy, with the exceptions of Preston Sturges and the Schlesinger satirical cartoons (“Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt”), has recently been tending toward the genteel, with writing teams dominating the picture. The more it gets like this the less good it is, and more especially, the less funny. This dependence on charm seems to be altogether on the wrong track, when you think how thoroughly you used to laugh at the early Disney, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin and Clair himself. It used to be that characters were inherently funny, now they just say funny things. It seems, remembering his old simplicity, fatuous to have tied René Clair up in the complicated plot of Thorne Smith and to have destroyed the free play of his naturalness, which, when it was comic naturalness, was truly comic.
November 30, 1942