He adapted Bewitched (1945), his second film as a director, from his own radio play, "Alter Ego," a drama about a young woman haunted by a voice in her head grows into an alternate and ultimately aggressive personality. Phyllis Thaxter, a young, fresh-faced ingénue newly contracted by MGM, stars as Joan Ellis, a bright, hopeful young bride from a good family with a history of "unease" that erupts in sudden assaults by the disembodied voice in her head. And they are assaults, spoken with a charge and a ferocity (not to mention a desire for "transgressive" pleasures) that overwhelms the meek good girl. The voice (by an uncredited Audrey Totter) becomes stronger and more aggressive and Joan makes a deal with the increasingly powerful personality: she will run away, leave her life behind for the excitement and possibilities of New York City, if the voice will leave her alone. It's only a temporary reprieve.
Bewitched is a psychological thriller that delivers a murder, a dramatic courtroom trial, and a psychiatrist to provide exposition, but it is also an attempt at a serious approach to multiple personality disorder. This is long before such psychological concepts became more known through productions like The Three Faces of Eve (not to mention Hitchcock's Psycho) and he presents therapy as less a process than a psychological exorcism, but if the terms and explanations are naïve, his commitment to the real case history that inspired his drama is genuine. Joan's story is framed by the case notes of Dr. Bergson (Edmund Gwenn), a psychiatrist who recalls her case file while Joan sits in prison awaiting her fate: "In 59 minutes, the clock will stop for her." Gwenn plays the voice of authority as a kindly, professorial doctor, gentle and understanding, pulling out a pipe to puff thoughtfully as he explains psychological concepts in layman terms.
It's no surprise that Oboler take an expressionistic approach to the soundtrack, overlapping the voice until it becomes a chorus that overwhelms Joan. But his images and narrative editing are often just as creative. After the voice drives Joan to murder, she imagines the trial in a rapid-fire montage that increases in tempo while her face, superimposed over the sequence, shows her growing horror. Then Oboler cuts directly to the trial. What we experienced as her nightmarish anticipation has, in a single striking edit, become a sketch of the actual trial and we rejoin her as she awaits the verdict. It's quite audacious and as conceptually ingenious and emotionally dynamic a cinematic invention you'll find in 1940s Hollywood.
Oboler finds creative solutions to creating mood and suggesting a scope on a small B-movie budget. He stages one man's persistent courtship of Joan through a montage of bouquets in a vase on a cigar counter, the flowers changing with each new visit, and sends Joan and her new beau (Henry H. Daniels Jr.) on a cruise around the harbor with little more than a simple railing, an elevated deck, a low-angle camera, and plenty of mist. The resulting atmosphere is both romantic and oddly unsettling and claustrophobic. Joan has fled her past life for the big city, yet her world still seems to be closing in on her.
Arch Oboler has been compared to Orson Welles for obvious reasons - they both have a storied history creating inventive radio drama, wrote the films they directed, experimented with new approaches to telling cinematic stories, and traded away big budgets for creative control of their films. But I can also see affinities with Jacques Tourneur's horror films with Val Lewton in Oboler's symbolic approach to expressing psychological states and anxieties. The struggle between Joan and her voice (who ultimately reveals her name as Karen) is also the conflict between id and superego, and Karen could be the repressed sexual hunger of the good girl fighting back with desire and an almost feral aggression. It's not that far from the struggle of Irena in Cat People. Oboler hasn't the visual elegance or subtlety of Tourneur -- he hasn't learned to create a mood with light and shadow and performance or sustain an atmosphere of unease or mystery for more than a sequence -- but he shares an interest in finding visual motifs and techniques to project the emotions, anxieties, and fears of the characters to the screen.
Bewitched is more conceptually inventive and creatively ambitious than visually evocative. Oboler hasn't an eye for expressive composition or framing at this point in his filmmaking evolution (Five, his 1951 drama, is more subtle and affecting), and his symbols tend to the literal. When Joan tries to outrun the voice, she ducks into a concert hall where a singer delivers an operatic rendition of the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," which becomes the soundtrack of her breakdown. (That this operatic rendition robs the spiritual of its pain and anguish is just another of Oboler's well-intentioned missteps.) And when our kindly paternal doctor brings both of the two psyches vying for control of Joan to the surface, they emerge as literal doppelgangers who line up beside the hypnotized body of Joan like the angel and devil sides tempting a hero.
Oboler's cinematic ideas, however, are compelling and adventurous, and the ambition of his project invests the film with a dynamism missing from the vast majority of B-movies and low-budget programmers. The B-movie unit was ostensibly a place for a creative young talent to learn on the job and experiment with technique. Oboler was one of the few who took the opportunity to push the medium in different directions and try out dramatic ideas on the screen. He makes Bewitched one of the most interesting B-movies of the 1940s.
Bewitched is released on the Warner Archive line of manufacture-on-demand discs from a preserved print. The level of grain is prominent but not distracting and the print is remarkably clean and quite beautiful. The images are sharp and the contrasts or strong. It's another fine disc from the Warner Archive. Also features the original trailer.
Thanks to the work by Matthew Rovner on Arch Oboler's filmmaking career in general and Bewitched in particular, published on Parallax View, which provided background on the filmmaker and helped guide some of my observations.
By Sean Axmaker
