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Dreyer's Day of Wrath soon revisits the witch-burning in ancestral Salem, the parishioner hawking "fresh Indian popped maize" to the audience returns in Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales. A curse on the Puritan's descendants, all of them stuck with shrewish spouses while the wronged transgressors chuckle from the tree planted over their ashes. A modern-day storm frees the specters, "a miracle, an infernal miracle," disembodied puffs of smoke searching for the latest incarnation of their tormentor. Thus the befuddled gubernatorial candidate (Fredric March) who, already dealing with election time and a sour socialite fiancée (Susan Hayward), must confront a friskily vengeful sorceress who takes the shape of Veronica Lake. (Their initial meeting finds her bare beneath a fur coat, admiring her new form on a mirror while the building collapses.) "True suffering cometh when a man is in love with the woman he cannot marry," the switcheroo has the heroine drinking her own amorous potion by mistake after getting bonked on the noggin by the falling patriarchal portrait. A supernatural screwball, René Clair merrily contemplating the airborne broomsticks and black cats of Americana. The occult troublemakers boast a long lineage ("Ever hear of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? That was our crowd"), the resurrected warlock (Cecil Kellaway) is fascinated by such modern inventions as the electric chair and distilled hooch. (His memory fails him when he tries an incantation while hungover: "If I could only remember the words, I could turn you into kangaroos!") Indoors hurricanes abort weddings and taxis take flight, though Clair's best special effect remains his leading lady's bounce of mischief as she munches on waffles or slides down banisters. Lean and Coward have the Old World view in Blithe Spirit. With Robert Benchley, Elizabeth Patterson, Robert Warwick, Eily Malyon, Aldrich Bowker, Robert Greig, Emory Parnell, and Chester Conklin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |