Bewitched

Wholesome gal Phyllis Thaxter lives with her upper-middle-class parents and plans to wed soon. But she's beginning to cause some concern; she's prone to odd fainting spells – blackouts, really – and to wandering the deserted streets of her midwestern city at night. Scant wonder, because living inside her, and clawing to get out, is Audrey Totter! Totter, in fact, gives perhaps the most chilling voice-of-the-demon performance until Mercedes McCambridge gave us Pazuzu in The Exorcist.

Capitalizing on the heightened interest in abnormal psychology spurred by the return of shell-shocked veterans, Bewitched latches onto a tabloid-worthy subject – multiple personality disorder. It's noteworthy in doing so a dozen years before both Lizzie and The Three Faces of Eve, in which, respectively, Eleanor Parker and Joanne Woodward (who nabbed the Oscar) displayed similar symptoms. Footnotes in medical journals probably do not cite any of these movies, so facile is their treatment of a troubling and controversial syndrome.

Thaxter tries a geographical cure, fleeing to New York where she falls in love with a lawyer (Stephen McNally). But when her old fiancé tracks her down, Totter, who apparently wasn't left behind, emerges to kill him with a pair of scissors. Then comes a stylized courtroom fantasy lifted all but intact from Boris Ingster's Stranger On The Third Floor, followed by a real murder trial. Wise old psychiatrist Edmund Gwynne explains everything to us, along with the Governor and his wife, and then proceeds to exorcize Totter (who, by the way, calls herself Karen).

Apart from Thaxter's nocturnal excursion, there's little original or striking about the movie. That we see the good girl but only hear the bad one is a big part of the problem. The extra energy that might have come from seeing Karen in action – for that matter, from casting Totter on-screen – gets thrown away. They picked the wrong personality.

Or, if you prefer, Mrs. Jekyll & Hyde without the serum. Many offbeat, inventive touches in this eerie, unusual (for its time) paranormal thriller (including what must be the only close-up of new paper being inserted into a typewriter I've ever seen in a movie) ; not entirely successful (for one thing, we don't see enough of the "wild" Karen), but a most worthy effort. **1/2 out of 4.

I'm giving this a seven, because it's cinematically well crafted. I was very interested to see how it would end, given that the Production Code ensured that virtue would be rewarded-- so would the Code let anyone get away with murder?

The film's theme of split personality suffers from a profound ignorance of that disorder's mechanics, and confuses it with certain forms of schizophrenia, an error still common today. Schizophrenia is a psychosis, a mental illness treatable with medication, while Multiple Personality Disorder, now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, is an acquired condition usually formed as a survival mechanism after unbearable trauma. In Bewitched it manifests more like demonic possession.

Dissociative Identity was first identified in the 1880s, but was still largely a mystery to many people. The idea of split personality readily leant itself to dramatic portrayal, especially onscreen, and this served to familiarize more of the general public with the condition. There was Blanche Sweet in "The Case of Becky" (1915) from the stage success by that name, remade in 1918 as "The Two-Soul Woman" with Priscilla Dean. Still to come were Constance Binney in a remake of "The Case of Becky" in 1921, followed by Gladys Walton in "The Untameable" (1923). Barbara La Marr took on a new treatment of the theme in "Sandra" (1924). More familiar today would of course be 1957's "The Three Faces of Eve" and later titles.

I couldn't help wondering why the poor girl never mentioned hearing that nasty voice in her head. Of course she didn't want people thinking she was CRAZY, so she just went on acting really disturbed, which had to suggest that she was-- well, DISTURBED.

The story makes no sense in psychological terms, so it's best not to worry about its half-baked medical aspects. Just figure that this nice girl somehow picked up a demon who wanted to take over. The demon 'Karen' is a vicious maneating floosy, itching to be set loose upon the world, and giving her Audrey Totter's voice makes her truly scary. If Karen ever got more than a few moments in control, woe to us all!

Average yet enteraining story about a young girl being plagued with a voice inside telling her what to do. The girl breaks down and listens to the voice, moving across country leaving her family and fiancée behind to make a new start. The film then has a new man come into the girl's life when old wounds are re-opened and tragedy strikes. While nothing particularly inventive takes place, I rather liked the mood created throughout the film. The film opens with the female protagonist in jail for a crime she didn't yet did commit. Phyllis Thaxter as Joan, the troubled young lady with multiple personalities living inside her, gives a more than competent portrayal of this tortured woman, yet the film's story is rather weak and completely falls apart in the last third when some ridiculous scientific explanation is given for her aberrant behaviour. Edmund Gwenn plays a psychiatrist/family friend and gives the film a bit of credibility with his performance. The rest of the cast is adequate and the film is mildly entertaining. Hypnosis, the gas chamber, and playing with scissors are all explored.

A woman on death row is discovered to have a split personality in "Bewitched," a 1945 film starring Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, and Stephen McNally. Thaxter is a young, soon to be wed woman who has blackouts, walks around at night, and hears voices. She runs away from her parents' home and her husband to be and goes to New York, gets a job, and meets an attorney (McNally) who falls for her. Her fiancé finds her, and, under orders from her other personality (voiced by Audrey Totter), she kills him.

Now we're brought back to death row where Edmund Gwenn suspects her problem and wants to hypnotize her.

Boring film with a good cast nonetheless, psychiatric disorders being a fashionable subject during and after World War II. What made Three Faces of Eve interesting was that the main character was a woman with a dull affect, but her personalities had lots of spark. Just hearing the voice of Totter here isn't enough. If Thaxter had actually been taken over by her alternate personality and, say, lived as her in New York, the film would have been a lot more interesting.

Not very good.