The New Pictures

I Married A Witch (United Artists) is a Sabbath brew made by mixing the somewhat corn-fed satiric fantasy of the late Thorne Smith (Topper) with the ultrasophisticated fantastic satire of Director Rene Clair (Le Million). The comedy is either barn-broad or razor-sharp and the cast who serve this cider-&-absinthe cocktail make it more than easy to take.

In 1690 a prim New Englander named Wooley (Fredric March) ran afoul of a witch (Veronica Lake) in a hayloft and had her and her supernatural father (Cecil Kellaway) burned alive and buried, for safekeeping, under the roots of an oak. The doomed witch cursed him and his male issue with disaster in love. The curse holds better & better in 1770, 1861, and 1904 (Fredric March, Fredric March and Fredric March). It looks even more propitious when, on a stormy night in 1942, lightning rives the oak and sets father and daughter at liberty once more, as a talkative pair of fumes who like to hide in whiskey bottles, ride brooms and play other engaging cinetricks.

Still another New Englander named Wooley (Fredric March), a candidate for Governor, is about to marry still another shrew (Susan Hayward). The witch promptly embodies herself as Miss Lake, nude in the obscuring smoke of a hotel fire, and sets about hexing Wooley into hopeless love with her. Though she wears his pajamas, gets into his bed, makes a shambles of his wedding, calls her father into fleshly form to help, drives Best Man Robert Benchley half-witted, and witches Wooley first out of, then into, the Governorship, she makes little amatory headway until she brews a love philtre. Unluckily, she drinks it herself.

From then on, her father fights her, and the romance is saved only by the fact that Love Conquers All and that her father, through a weakness for booze, gets himself corked up in a bottle, trolling tavern songs. When last seen, the happy couple are thoroughly domesticated, but a little daughter, peering from behind a blonde Lake bang, is beginning to show a portentous interest in brooms.

Fredric March, better than holds up his farcical end. Robert Benchley is still Hollywood's most reliable ban vivant, though Cecil Kellaway, as the alcoholic old warlock, gives him unctuous competition. Veronica Lake, with a voice like a hoarse clarinet, makes a bewitching witch, scarcely taller (5 ft. 2 in.) than the broom she hexes. Rene Clair lets Thome Smith have his amiable way much of the time (good line from Witch Lake: "Ever hear of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? That was our crowd"). But Clair's shrewish fiancee is a malicious description of an All-American female type; the abortive wedding is vintage Clair; and the lethally heavy quartered-oak set in which this love feast takes place packs enough documentary U.S. satire to stock a whole volume of Sinclair Lewis.

Springtime in the Rockies (20th Century-Fox) ends with a song called Pan-Americana Jubilee and attempts to be just that by whipping together 1) Latin America (Cesar Romero, Carmen Miranda and her band), 2) the U.S. (Betty Grable, John Payne, Harry James and his band), 3) Canada (large Technicolor hunks of Lake Louise, where the action takes place). The addition of an Eskimo and a penguin would have made the show still more hemispheric in scope, but Springtime in the Rockies, though it had its moments, is something of a dud.

The story, one of those unpleasantries which strangely pass for comedy if a few songs and dances are thrown in, concerns the unscrupulous, ultimately successful efforts of Hoofer John Payne to win back ex-Partner Betty Grable from Hoofer Cesar Romero. But it has two live spots. One of them is Betty Grable. When she acts, she stirs up images of the neat chunks she could bite out of two-inch planks; but when, far too seldom, she dances, the picture becomes something worth watching. For Miss Grable has a body like an electric eel, and she uses it with frenetic incisiveness.

The other is Carmen Miranda, who sings some intricate patter (notably on Chattanooga Choo Choo) and whose Equatorial improvements on Martha Raye and Fin D'Orsay supply the one warmhearted, likable motif in the picture.

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Carmen Miranda, whose real name is Maria da Cunha, is a Hollywood anomaly in that she has endeared herself equally to the men and the women of that far-from-Philadelphian community. The men like her because of her vitality, her broad delight in her excellent figure and her generosity in showing it off; the women like her because, apart from the noise and fun, she is wholly unadventurous and unthreatening. Miss Miranda claims to be 28, looks 10 years older, salvages an otherwise homely and pock-harmed face with a beautifully expressive mouth. Incredible to Hollywood is the fact that she is never seen with a man. She has, she says, no interest, and writes once a month to a doctor in Rio, who telephones her every weekend. When she goes to Latin American nightclubs she is convoyed by the entire membership of her six-piece band, whom she deploys thus as soon as they enter: "You three seet at that table, you three seet at that. I sect alone. How would eet look for one girl to seet weeth seex mans?"

With the same seex mans, her mother and her sister Aurora, Miss Miranda lives in a rented house in Beverly Hills which was built by a producer and which could only possibly have been conceived in a producer's mind--rococo living room, mirrored boudoir, a playroom complete with knotty-pine paneling, bar, billiard and poker tables and an autographed picture of Mickey Rooney. In idle hours Carmen whizzes around in a Cadillac convertible, sweems (inevitably, a pool comes with the house), goes daily to the movies, which she looves.

During the shooting of Springtime in the Rockies a shameful trick was played on her. A fan-magazine photographer (who has since been fired) so doctored one of his negatives that Miss Miranda appeared to be dancing without a leotard. He sold hundreds of prints, at a quarter each, at the gates of aircraft plants and elsewhere. Said she with native dignity: "Why should I be so foolish to dance weethout de pants?"

Seven Sweethearts (M.G.M.), sopranos all, sugar a resourceful ham (Comedian S. Z. Sakall) to musicalize the "wholesome" tale of a reed-tweetling old Dutchman and his seven daughters in an unconscionably quaint little Tulip Town in Michigan.

When a wandering photoreporter (Van Heflin) gets sucked into this cultural air pocket, seven sweethearts are after him like a pack of soprano hounds. Regina (Marsha Hunt), the stage-struck eldest, wants the reporter's hand because she thinks that he can put her name in lights. The middle five, slaves of an old Dutch custom giving first chance to the eldest, aid & abet the match for all their high Cs are worth although Billie (Kathryn Grayson), the youngest, loves him just for himself, but cannot bear to offend tradition by making off with him.

In the course of working out these difficulties Seven Sweethearts shrinks the talents of nearly everybody in it. Only Comedian S. Z. Sakall manages to squeeze out its small juice of laughter and pathos.

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