Maid of Salem

A couple of months back, I mentioned the Claudette Colbert box set that I picked up. One of the odder entries in the set is Maid of Salem, which I recently watched.

Colbert plays Barbara Clarke, who lives in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Now if you know your history you'll know that's the year of the infamous Salem witch trials. Barbara lives with her aunt Ellen (Louise Dresser) and the two work as candlers, making candles for the rest of the village in exchange for the goods and services they need. Ellen is being pursued romantically by Miles Corbin (Sterling Holloway), a cow herder who has ambitions of getting some good land with a sizable amount of livestock.

Among the people to whom the Clarkes sell their candles is the Elder Goode (Edward Ellis), who seems to have the only slave in town, Tituba (Madame Sul-Te-Wan). We see Tituba doing a bit of palmistry to tell the fortunes of a bunch of the town's women, which ticks the Elder off to no end when he finds out. What terrible idle, gossipy women! Indeed, even his own wife (Beulah Bondi) is in on it.

Another of the Clarkes' clients is Jeremiah (Halliwell Hobbes), who lives a bit outside the village on a hilltop that looks entirely too high for Massachusetts. He lives alone, but things lead Barbara to believe he's not along right now, and wouldn't you know, she's right. Jeremiah's nephew Roger Coverman (Fred MacMurray) is there, having fled Virginia where he's considered a rebel. Because he's a wanted man and there's a reward on his head, he's more or less hiding out. But he falls in love with Barbara, and the feeling is mutual.

This causes Roger to stray from the confines of his uncle's property, and people start seeing him, thinking they've seen the devil. This, combined with Tituba's fortune telling and practicing of some elements of the traditional African culture that have still been handed down since she's probably only a second-generation slave, and reports of witchcraft in other parts of the Massachusetts colony, lead to the eventual accusations of witchcraft that tear the village asunder.

Ironically, it's the Elder Goode's own daughter Ann (Bonita Granville) who sets the ball rolling. She's stolen one of Dad's books on how to deal with witches, and thinks it would be interesting to find out what it's really like to be bewitched. Of course, when she strts acting bewitched, she can't tell everyone it's just a lark since she'd get in big trouble with her strict father. So she starts rumors as to who's bewitched her. The town's citizens quickly realize that it's better for them to make false accusations before other people can accuse them.

Among the people accusing Barbara is her own cousin Timothy. He thought he saw Roger although he didn't know Roger's real identity of course. He also sees Barbara practicing a dance Roger had taught her that definitely wouldn't be allowed in Salem. He puts two and two together and immediately suspects something's wrong. The fact that Barbara is a bit of a free spirit doesn't help her cause. Barbara, for her part, could produce an alibi in the form of Roger, but since he's a fugitive she doesn't want to get him caught and extradited back to Virginia where he'd probably hang anyway. (Or at least that's what we think; there's one scene in which we discover that the new governor will be pardoning the rebels.)

Maid of Salem is odd in that when I think of Colbert and MacMurray being paired together, I think of romantic comedy, and something fairly light. Not the Salem witch trials. Now, the material is somewhat lighter than The Crucible or any more modern retelling of the trials would be, but still, there's some fairly dramatic stuff here. There's a lot of obvious Hollywood here, most notably Colbert, who looks more like a star than 1690s.

But although Maid of Salem is always a Hollywood product, it's still quite an interesting movie, and not a bad one. It's also always timely, whether you have Arthur Miller reworking the Salem witch trials to be an allegory about the Red Scare of the 1950s, or whether you can compare it to the deplatforming movement coming from the opposite political direction that's going on today. Definitely worth a watch.