Synopsis
SHE LIVED TWO AMAZING LIVES! Darling of Society... Cruel Love-Killer
A girl enlists a psychic to get rid of her murderous alternate personality.
Bewitched
Cast
Phyllis Thaxter Edmund Gwenn Henry H. Daniels Jr. Addison Richards Kathleen Lockhart Francis Pierlot Sharon McManus Gladys Blake Will Wright Stephen McNally Oscar O'Shea Minor Watson Virginia Brissac Audrey Totter Harry Strang Forbes Murray Tom Coleman Clancy Cooper Eddie Dunn George Meader Howard M. Mitchell Harry Seymour Forrest Taylor Anthony Warde Paul Weigel Crane Whitley
Director
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Releases by Date
Theatrical
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USANR
Releases by Country
USA
04 Jul 1945
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Popular reviews
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Not a twitching nose in sight.
No, Bewitched is an earlier very low budget noir from B-movie and radio play specialist Arch Oboler. Its very quaint portrayal of dissociative identity disorder is bordering on the almost comedic at times, because of how ridiculous it is. There's literally a point where Phyllis Thaxter has an evil version of herself sitting on one shoulder.
On that front, it's junk. What it does get right, maybe accidentally, is in how it portrays Thaxter's mental health problems pushing her to the point where there's no escape. At one point, Thaxter leaves everyone she knows behind to start a new life and it works, for a while, before it all comes creeping back again. That…
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Kind of incredible that Arch Oboler came out with this scary ’losing my life to insanity’ almost-noir in 1945. The depiction of struggle with serious mental illness is campy & expressionist yet disconcertingly realistic in some aspects. There are a couple scenes in which Joan (Phyllis Thaxter in what I now consider her best role) is experiencing frightening auditory hallucinations that really got to me. A distorted version of her own voice tells her horrible things about herself and to commit violent acts. She is hounded to exhaustion by the voice, driven to run away from her home & loved ones and sabotage her chances not just for happiness but for survival.
It's a dark, complex psychological tale, especially for such a…
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It's safe to say that 1945's Bewitched isn't the best depiction of mental illness - the split personality our heroine suffers from seems more like demonic possession than anything else - but the sterling cast of actors on hand makes this for an entertaining ride. Phyllis Thaxter is mesmerizing as a woman torn between her good and evil halves and Edmund Gwenn is his ever charming and kindly self as the sympathetic psychiatrist.
Note: This take on multiple personality disorders predates The Three Faces of Eve and Psycho, by twelve and fifteen years, respectively, so it gets points for that.
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Poppycock. Actually a case study in psychiatric malpractice. No one listens, everyone minimalises and resorts to denial - every character in this film is an idiot; especially the psychiatrist.
The only thing good about this movie is it is a strong case to abolish the death penalty. Of course if the character had been a person of colour or poor or ugly they would have been done without a second thought. Sounds like Rod Sterling in the Twilight Zone voice over?
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The lovely Phyllis Thaxter stars as Joan, a woman with a secret known to no one (but us, of course); she has a voice in her head. And it's not a pleasant one. It seems to delight in berating and antagonizing her. It causes her embarassment and shame to the point where she runs away from her family and even her boyfriend Bob. She settles across country, where she eventually meets Eric, a kind man she wants to love, but is afraid to. But that's far from the worst of it, as the voice, which she thought she'd been rid of, returns, and will try harder than ever to ruin her life.
I went in wanting to see another of…
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BEWITCHED (1945)
"A young woman has two distinct personalities, one of whom is evil."
There's no witches here; nope, the only sorcery we get is from the film-noir approach!
Bewitched is a classic psychological film noir with elements of crime interspersed. It offers strong performances, breathtaking imagery, exquisite cinematography, and sophisticated class in the storytelling for the first forty minutes or so. Produced on a low budget, I'm surprised how elegant this film appears. Honestly, the only issues I have are with the third act. The story becomes a tad mundane towards the end, with a psychosocial statement made that I don't really believe in plus an abruptly quick hypnosis trick that has some odd hard-to-swallow outcomes.
Bewitched is definitely classy, but I wish the ending could've been as well made as the beginning portions. -
Viewed on TCM
This film about a woman with a split personality is quite funny without meaning to be.
Phyllis Thaxter plays the young woman with mental affliction, who's named looked familiar to me during the credits played Ma Kent in Richard Donner's Superman (1978).The film is not very long and the performances are a little out there so it makes for a quick quirky and weird look at mental illness.
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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…
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This film started out intriguing.. An introduction in the form of a voice-over like that of a Twilight Zone episode which quickly drew you in, and the ending also had an outtro, just the same. I can't be too upset with the way in which the main characters mental illness was portrayed due largely to the fact the film itself was only 1 hour 5 mins.
Phyllis Thaxter did a fine performance of a woman who was suffering from schizophrenia and had a split personality. The illness itself was not really handled the best and the continuous voice-overs of her other personality was bordering obnoxious. The ending makes it seem that these illness' are easily cured and we know that…
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Clearly there was a lot that the general public, and probably science, didn't understand about mental illness, multiple personality disorder specifically. The filmmakers used artistic license to dramatize the situation into a tawdry murder plot, and pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo to hypnotize their way out of it.
Worth a watch for the performances and as a precursor to better films on the subject that would come in the decades that followed.