I Married a Witch

I Married a Witch is a 1942 American supernatural romantic comedy film, directed by René Clair, and starring Veronica Lake as a witch whose plan for revenge goes comically awry, with Fredric March as her foil. The film also features Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward and Cecil Kellaway. The screenplay by Robert Pirosh and Marc Connelly and uncredited other writers, including Dalton Trumbo, is based on the 1941 novel The Passionate Witch by Thorne Smith, who died before he could finish it; it was completed by Norman H. Matson. Plot Two witches in colonial Salem, the witch Jennifer and her father the warlock Daniel, are burned at the stake after being denounced by Puritan Jonathan Wooley. Their ashes are buried beneath a tree to imprison their evil spirits. In revenge, Jennifer curses Wooley and his male descendants, dooming them always to marry the wrong woman. Centuries pass. Generation after generation, Wooley men marry cruel, shrewish women. Finally, in 1942, lightning splits the tree, freeing the spirits of Jennifer and Daniel. They discover Wallace Wooley, living nearby and running for governor, on the eve of marrying the spoiled Estelle Masterson, daughter of newspaper publisher J.B. Masterson, who just so happens to be Wooley's chief political backer. Initially, Jennifer and Daniel manifest as white vertical smoky "trails," occasionally hiding in empty, or sometimes not-so-empty, bottles, some of which are of alcohol. Jennifer persuades Daniel to conjure a human body for her with which to torment Wallace. Daniel needs fire to perform this spell, and so he burns down the Pilgrim Hotel. This serves a dual purpose, as Jennifer uses the emergency to trap Wallace into rescuing her from the burning building.