Another nearly perfect clean up and release from the Criterion Collection, this is an entertainingly surprise to me, both that I hadn’t run into it on tv before and that I enjoyed it so much. She’s a truly evil witch, wanting to burn down entire hotels and kill everyone inside, then torture some poor sap that had the misfortune to be the descendant of a man responsible for her death 200 years prior. Tables are turned however when her poison concoction ends up in her belly instead of his and she falls desperately in love with a guy that she had previously wanted to watch suffer. Veronica Lake as the witch is enthralling, I do look forward to seeing more of her in the future, though I’ve read that she suffered a fair bit in her later years, dying at a pretty young age.
Some fun trivia for you, this was released in 1942, a full 3 years after Wizard of Oz and you can clearly hear the same style of music for her as the witch as you hear for the Wicket Witch of the West. Additionally, if my math works out, Veronica Lake was either 19 or 20 when this was filmed while her costar Fredric March was 45.
“Every man who marries, marries the wrong woman, True Suffering is when a man is in love with someone he cannot marry…”
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