Aka: We Don't Understand Mental Illness: The Movie. This is a weird one and a bad one. Let's just dive in.
Joan Ellis is a young woman who should to all rights be happy. She has loving and doting parents, and an equally loving and doting boyfriend, Bob, who wants to marry her someday. Her family seems well-liked and affluent. However, she has the rather serious problem of someone else living in her head. This other voice, which sounds like a crabby 40-year-old waitress with emphysema, is Karen, and she actively tries to ruin Joan's life--in essence, her plot is to weaken Joan enough where she can rule over their shared body, thus enabling her life of evil. Eventually, Joan gets the help she needs, but not before Karen forces her to murder Bob after he tracks her down when she runs away from home. But can the doctors save her before she's due to be executed for Bob's slaying?
I shouldn't be quite as hard on this movie as the opening implies. While its views and explanations on dissociative identity disorder are primitive to the point of ableism, and there is virtually no effort put forth to understand the illness at work, the victim of the illness is definitively portrayed as a victim, and consequently there's an effort to sympathize (but not empathize) with her. Perhaps most significantly, it shows the effects of social stigma against mental illness and people who have it, because Joan never feels safe talking to Bob or her family about her problems for fear of them isolating her. In a time where you could be sent to a mental institution for teen rebellion and get a lobotomy for autism, there's a notable chance that her fears would be valid, especially when you consider the Ellises' wealth and social position. Crazy folk in a rich household are Just Not Done. While there is no attempt made to address or correct this possibility that maybe stigma against mental illness just makes the suffering worse, it still presents enough of a threat where audiences at the time could have left the theater thinking. Unfortunately, so much else is done wrong--and the movie itself is so cookie-cutter--that the whole affair barely registers on the synapses at all.
The plot is very stereotypical: an ordinary girl is suddenly confronted with the horror of an insidious illness, which leads her to make a fatal mistake, though she is redeemed and cured in the end. She is nearly rescued by one man and fully saved by another. I didn't mention Eric in the synopsis--he's the lawyer who falls in love with Joan when she becomes a cigar stop clerk after running away. He's also kind of creepy, because while it does turn out that Joan's reluctance to go out with him is due to her own anxiety rather than a lack of attraction, he doesn't exactly turn away when she turns him down day after day after day. He also proposes to her on their first date, which is strange even by '40s standards. It's not like Bob is much better though. I was a little glad when Bob died, to be honest. He's one of those dudes who think that lines like "I love you and I don't know why" are romantic. He also introduces Joan to a little girl as his grandmother? "She's very weak, but if you help her along she can come with us to the zoo." It's really not charming, and I don't exactly trust his eagerness to take a strange little girl to the zoo without her parents.
What is interesting about Eric is that his marriage proposal triggers the first instance in which Karen is able to fully use Joan's body, implying her problem is rooted in intimacy. She then proceeds to grope and mack on him pretty hard, suggesting that Karen's primary evil...is that she's a sexually interested woman. This is a problem in itself but a bigger issue is that what Karen does to Joan is strange and not well connected. Her primary form of harassment seems to be mocking Joan about her mere existence, insisting that she run away before her loved ones lock her up. Next, she expresses strong lust for Eric, but this is followed by her killing Bob. She seemingly kills Bob for reasons related to the first bombardment of taunts--she wants to keep Joan isolated from people who will think she's crazy. The lust for Eric comes back but it's not strongly tied to the murder plot. We can only assume that Karen sees Eric as a more ideal partner than the admittedly dreary Bob, though she also uses him as an anchor to carve out the independent life she desires. While Karen seeks to achieve her goals through violence, she desires a sort of independence and sexuality which Joan denies herself in her ordinary life, and which she permanently refuses at the end by accepting a chaste upper-class existence with Eric. No reason is ever given for Karen's existence. The movie seems to legitimately believe that multiple personalities are the product of two minds born in one brain by a fluke of hormones, like some failed conjoined twin where only their immaterial consciousness formed. Joan is never shown to have suffered any sort of trauma in the past that facilitated Karen's manifestation--we're to believe she literally popped in existence one day after years of sleeping. But because Karen appears as Joan's sexuality and desire for life outside her family, maybe that's a sign of how Joan's problem came to be. Maybe she legitimately feels trapped by her upper-class existence, and its curtailment on sexual experimentation. If so, the fact that she goes back to that at the end makes the film's conclusion actually really sad--to say nothing of the fact that she's still hanging under threat of execution as the last title card comes onscreen! 'Cause yeah, even if it was proven that Joan wasn't at fault, and that her alternate personality killed Bob, she's still been convicted. This is kind of a strange thing to consider because admittedly, the movie does suck you into the feeling of Karen's otherness. Whatever Karen represents within or without my interpretation of her, she's still a threat to at least one innocent person, and that's enough for the viewer to coherently separate her from Joan.
The thing is, though, I feel this movie is a cash-in on MGM's behalf more than anything. (Yes, despite having the plot of a Monogram movie, this was put out by MGM.) People say that this movie almost works as an early exorcism movie, because of the final scene with Edmund Gwenn as Joan's psychologist, wherein he employs good ol' fashioned Hollywood Hypnotism. Replace the Jesus stuff with psychiatry and it's beat for beat almost the same. The Good Man talks the Demon to death. However, Karen's frequent reference to "freedom" made me think of Fredrich March's Hyde in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That movie was remade with Spencer Tracy in 1941, a whole four years before Bewitched...by MGM. Yep, they were ripping off themselves. This isn't anything big, because the big studios did and do that all the fucking time, but the recognition of Bewitched as a de-glorified Jekyll and Hyde clone simultaneously kills and boosts the movie for me. On one hand, it helps explain why it was such a deflated experience, empty of life somehow. On the other, it adds another twist to it that keeps it wedged in my head.
Bewitched is not what I would call a fun film to watch, but it's a fun film to remember. I talk about movies on this site that I love because they're legitimately good, or they're so ridiculous that I can't help but love them. There's also of course the odd movie that I love because they're extremely banal, but their banality makes them exceptional in some way. Bewitched is a movie, though, where it's more a mess to figure out, a puzzle, and while it yields almost nothing in the end, it at least gave me something to say, if I could be said to have said anything. I always relish a chance to talk about mental illness, and how on occasion the great studios of Hollywood's golden years were a bunch of shameless hacks. Watch Bewitched for laughs and a fun Edmund Gwenn performance, but don't expect much else.
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