I Married a Witch
This event is in the past
Sunday, February 5, 2023, 5 pm
The Beacon
Columbia City (Seattle)
This is an in-person event
$12.50
The following description comes from the event organizer.
A 300-year-old witch wreaks havoc when she falls in love with a young politician! René Clair’s I MARRIED A WITCH is among the buried treasures of 1940s American filmmaking and Veronica Lake casts a seductive spell as a charmingly vengeful sorceress in this screwball classic.Sorting through the career trajectories of the people who worked on I MARRIED A WITCH feels like being an air traffic controller in a storm of spirits — phantoms arriving from far-flung corners of time’s oblivion to work together on one bedazzling movie. In the hands of silent-era French surrealist René Clair, the story has broad fantastic conceits — the immortality of witches, flying ghosts, decidedly horny transubstantiation — and quickly creates a shimmering preternatural world with understandable rules, in which romance can flourish with the intoxicating logic of music. When the incorporeal Veronica Lake first appears in the film as a wisp of talking smoke, we are asked to believe in, and want to believe in, the existence of a love free-floating through the world in search of its yearned-for object.
The movie is gorgeously designed by art-directing legends Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté, shot with silvery studio sumptuousness by Ted Tetzlaff, and scored by Roy Webb, who received an Academy Award nomination for understanding when to melodize this near-musical and when to stand back and let the director supply the lyricism sans notes. I MARRIED A WITCH overflows with the same comic irreverence and fleet storytelling as all of Clair's most wondrous films and is propelled by a great comic velocity. A perfect supernatural screwball confection.