There were a couple of movies on TCM in July that I forgot to record to my DVR, so I had to watch them off the Watch TCM app before they expired in August. One of them is Bewitched, which I believe will remain on the Watch TCM app until August 24.
The movie opens with shots of a clock and a nighttime city skyline, with a voiceover telling us somebody is going to die tonight. We then cut to a psychiatrist, Dr. Bergson (Edmund Gwenn), who is dictating notes to his secretary about one of his cases. We then go to a flashback, and it doesn't take too much to guess that the person Bergson is talking about is going to be the same person who is about to die.
That someone is Joan Arlis Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter), who lives in one of those small towns that populated American movies of the era, although this one seems to be out in California since a later train montage moves the action eastward. Joan most likely suffers from schizophrenia although neither she nor the people around her would have recognized this. But she hears voices in her head, specially the voice of another woman calling herself "Karen".
Joan is engaged to Bob (Henry Daniels Jr.), a nice enough young man who only sees that something might be wrong with Joan when she suffers a fainting spell. Joan has another such spell and continues to hear the voice of Karen, so she tries to get away from it by walking the streets of town, which isn't enough to quite the voice. She has to get away from here, as much as it's going to hurt her parents and her fiancé. Joan decides to go to New York City, since she thinks she can be anonymous there and maybe the voice won't come back.
After the montage I mentioned above, Joan gets a job at the cigar-store counter in one of those elegant hotels the way they were in movies of the 1940s. Showing up at the counter is young attorney Eric (Stephen McNally credited as Horace). He immediately falls for Joan, not knowing Joan's secret, which kinda sort manifests itself again when the couple decide to go on a river cruise and Karen takes over for Joan acting in a way that the demure Joan never would.
Worse is that, even though Joan wrote in her letter that neither Bob nor her parents should try to find her, they have naturally been trying to do just that, with the predictable result that Bob shows up at the boarding house where Joan has been saying. Karen is none too pleased about that, so takes over for Joan again, only with it being violent this time as Karen stabs Bob dead, leading to a first-degree murder charge which means the death penalty. Joan in theory could claim insanity, but she also feels the shame of not wanting to admit anything about Karen. Besides, she's willing to die if it means taken Karen to the grave with her. Dr. Bergson is put on the case, which is how he's able to show up in the opening scene. It also leads to the climax.
Director Arch Oboler got his start in radio, and his direction of Bewitched really shows that background, making me think of another B movie, Inner Sanctum that I blogged about some time back. (I have to find that box set and start going through more of those movies, although I have enough of a backlog on my DVR.) Bewitched has a plot that's a bit ridiculous and talky at times, but it's mostly interesting thanks to Thaxter's performance. Bewitched was made at MGM, which makes me wonder why it doesn't show up all that often on TCM. But it's definitely worth watching.
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