The Importance of Being Not Fiery

On Rene Claire’s I MARRIED A WITCH

Kamyar Mohsenin

Once Luis Bunuel wrote that the Europeans are too intellectual to make movies. When thinking of the notions to Dante and Beatrice in the romantic dialogue between Wooley and the Witch in Rene Clair’s American romantic comedy, I MARRIED A WITCH, Bunuel’s point is absolutely comprehensible, but the whole film indicates how it is possible to alter an American genre film.

Interestingly Clair’s film focuses on a main plot and forgets all about the very popular subplots. For instance, the mayor candidacy of Wooley (Frederic March) which could lead to the popular political jokes is simply put aside. In the main plot, there is a triangle, but not an ordinary love triangle. The approach is more similar to a comedy as described in the essential aesthetic texts where there are a man and a woman in love and an elderly man relentlessly trying to make them apart. However when the lovers marry at last, the elderly does not learn a new lesson in life – as prescribed in the old formula. There is no way but putting back the disturbing genie back in the bottle!

This way, in a romantic comedy, Clair marginalizes the fiancée character stereotype, Estelle (Susan Hayward) in order to focus on the two unearthly characters, Jennifer (Veronica Lake) and her father, Daniel (Cecil Kellaway), not to embody a metaphysical love, but to glorify the love as it happens on the Earth – a concept which was glorified 45 years later in Wim Wenders’s DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN. Delving into the paradox, Clair turns one unearthly element, fire, into the fourth character and forms an entertaining piece on the importance of being not fiery.

K.