Just in time for Halloween, pair of delightful, long-unavailable supernatural classics — Lewis Allen’s “The Uninvited” (1944) and Rene Clair’s “I Married a Witch” (1942) — are out in sparkling new black-and-white Blu-ray transfers (with separate DVD releases) from The Criterion Collection (full disclosure: I was compensated by Criterion to provide liner notes for their January special edition of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”).
Both films were produced at Paramount, though “Witch” was the prize of a package of completed films (including “The Crystal Ball” and “Young and Willing” and some Hopaling Cassidy titles) that the overstocked studio sold off to product-starved United Artists for theatrical release. Eventually bundled with other UA-owned titles like “To Be Or Not to Be” and “Foreign Correspondent” for TV sale, “Witch” has passed through many hands since, finally being restored to something like its original glory by Criterion in a version that’s a quantum leap from the ragged-looking 1990 VHS release by Warner Home Video.
This very funny comedy stars a never-sexier Veronica Lake as the ghost of a 300-year-old witch who, released from a spell, finally gets an opportunity to take revenge on a decendant of the man who had her and her father (Cecil Kellaway) burned at the stake in Olde New England. The poor man (and, briefly, his unhappy ancestors) are played by Frederic March, who has great chemistry with Lake though his off-camera attempts to seduce the actress were reportedly met with a kick in the groin.
March is a gubernatorial candidate with a bossy fiancee (Susan Hayward) who Lake (who first arranges for March to rescue her, in the nude, from a burning hotel) tries unsuccessful to seduce. When Lake fails at that, she resorts to a magic potion that she accidentally swallows herself — and falls in love with March.
The partial inspiration for the TV series “Bewitched” (along with “Bell, Book and Candle”) holds up quite well, with humorist/actor Robert Benchley quite amusing as March’s best friend — who reacts quite casually when he pronounces both Lake and Kellaway dead separate scenes.
Directed with panache (and lots of sight gags) by French helmer Clair in his second American film (after the Marlene Dietrich flop “The Flame of New Orleans”), “I Married a Witch” has very high production values and excellent special effects. There are no special features save an audio interview with Clair and the trailer, but the booklet contains a wonderful essay by director Guy Maddin and another archival interview with Clair.
Though most of them were not credited on “I Married a Witch” because of the studio switch, some of the same crew and set designers — including Paramount’s master of process shots, Farciot Edouart — worked on “The Uninvited,” which recycles a redressed version of the same grand staircase used in the earlier film.
Considered one of the first films to treat a supernatural theme seriously, “The Univited” is set almost entirely inside an old mansion on an English coastal cliff that siblings Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are surprised to find they can purchase for a song from a gruff artist (Donald Crisp) in 1937.
The sale upsets Crisp’s granddaughter Gail Russell, whose parents long ago lived in the house before tragedy struck. Milland and Hussey soon discover the old house is indeed, haunted — and that sorting out what’s troubling the spirits (one of them is the mistress of Russell’s father) is crucial to the mental health of Russell, with whom Milland quickly falls in love (he’s a music critic and composer who serenades Russell with Victor Young’s “Stella by Starlight,” which became a standard).
Though Milland shows off his talent for light comedy in a handful of scenes, the film is full of shocks that hold up quite well after all these years. The performances in Allen’s impressive directorial debut are uniformly excellent, including stage actress Cornelia Otis Skinner (who Russell portrays as a teenage in that same year’s “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay”) as a crypto-lesbian sanitarium owner and Alan Napier — the beloved Alfred the Butler of TV’s “Batman” — as the local doctor and Hussey’s nominal love interest. The ending casts a real spell, pointing the way toward such post-war supernatural romances as “Portrait of Jenny.”
The release includes a 25-minute visual essay by Michael Michael Almereyda, a pair of radio adaptations and a booklet featuring a perceptive essay by our own Farran Smith Nehme and a 1997 interview with director Allen, then 90.