Bewitched (1945)

Bewitched (1945) is a paranoid woman psychological voice-in-her-head voiceover flashback assumed identity psychological terror supernatural schizophrenic medical insane woman fleeing marriage hypnotism flashback and voice over film noir from the dark height of the golden age of the silver screen's era.

The term classic film noir does doubtless evoke as it is intended to do, a series of high powered and famous high stakes noir dramas from the period, usually of eminent structure and production, and preserved by film registries and their buffs, citing such names as Double Indemnity and the rest of the well-trod shuffle of the mighty, while 1945 alone boasts the classics of Detour (1845), Scarlet Street (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Lost Weekend (1945), yes it's the year that film noir won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

The term classic however might as well refer to a type of the type which exemplifies all of that type's best properties, and in the case of Bewitched (1945), an unknown and cheaper production, short at 65 minutes and rather less polished than the bigger numbers.

Bewitched (1945) is classic exactly because it is so very typical of the style. The paranoid woman plagued by a voiceover, who tells her to flee, to escape marriage and other domestic fortune by running into the city, and hiding within its anonymous folds.

Classic because of the trajectory of fear and the panic of identify, and classic because of how it aims to express social fears. It's as noir as hell, as noir as it gets: a young woman has two distinct personalities, one of whom is evil and constantly gets her in trouble.

If that does not qualify as high twentieth century angst, then what else could?

Arch Oboler’s Bewitched (1945) is an unclassifiable artefact, shuttling between noir-inflected horror, courtroom melodrama, and quasi-medical treatise. It exists not quite within any one genre, yet its commitment to unease, both aesthetic and psychic, makes it a film of peculiar magnetism. It is classic film noir if not and it is not, classic film noir.

At sixty-six minutes, it cannot be said to linger, but within its compressed duration, it offers a hallucinatory glimpse into the disintegrating mind of its protagonist. The medium is shadow, and the message is that of the splintered self.

Bewitched is one of the earliest American movie noir and cinema films to explore with the ham fist of the typewriter hack and pulp fictionalist author and studio what was then termed "split personality," though modern psychiatry would later separate this phenomenon from the diagnosis of schizophrenia. 

In 1945, however, the language of psychological disorder had not yet settled. What mattered, theatrically, was the idea of a woman at war with herself. The duality within Joan Alris Ellis (Phyllis Thaxter) is presented not symbolically but literally, with her malevolent double voiced by Audrey Totter, whose disembodied snarling conjures an internal demon rendered as pure noir menace.

The plot unspools in unruly pools of unspooling and all in flashback: Joan awaits execution for a murder she does not remember committing. Her mind, fractured, contains within it another woman—Karen—who commands her to kill. The film does not permit the viewer the safety of clear boundaries. 

Joan is herself and also not herself. She is both victim and perpetrator. Oboler's scenario offers no space for comfort. The camera does not flatter. Salerno’s cinematography is thick with shadow, heavy with menace. Light is used sparingly, cruelly, and never redemptively.

There is a sense in which Bewitched feels closer to radio than to cinema. This is unsurprising. Oboler, a giant of mid-century audio horror, transplants the conceits of his "Lights Out" broadcasts into the visual field. 

This transfer is uneasy, sometimes clumsy. The monologues are arch and overextended; exposition is handled through dialogue, heavy and declarative. Yet this awkwardness is not a flaw so much as a symptom. The film behaves like a case study read aloud in an echoing chamber.

The film was released in 1945, a year scarred by unimaginable trauma. The war in Europe had ended in May; Japan would soon be obliterated. American soldiers returned home shattered, and their injuries were not all visible. 

Shellshock had acquired a new name: battle fatigue. Psychology was newly central. Bewitched, then, is not merely a melodrama about madness; it is a cinematic symptom of a culture reeling from a confrontation with the psyche's abyss. 

That Joan is a civilian woman and not a soldier suggests that mental fracture was no longer quarantined to the battlefield.

Joan is not saved by love. Nor is she saved by religion, by society, or by the law. She is rescued, if that word can be used, by the intervention of psychiatry, represented by the reassuring and avuncular Edmund Gwenn. 

But even this salvation is suspect. The diagnosis is perfunctory. The cure is absurd. Under hypnosis, Karen is banished, exorcised like a demon, and Joan is restored, seemingly whole. The resolution is neat, tidy, and ludicrous. But this neatness is essential to its era. Hollywood, in 1945, was unready to leave audiences in ambiguity.

And yet ambiguity leaks through the cracks. The atmosphere, thick with dread, contradicts the clean ending. Joan’s evil self is voiced, not seen. The film withholds embodiment, choosing instead to create a spectral presence that is more frightening for being unlocatable. 

Cross class smoking edit dissolve in Bewitched (1945)

Totter’s performance is only vocal, but it looms larger than many full-bodied villains. Her voice twists around Joan’s, contaminates her speech, mocks her goodness. The effect is claustrophobic, uncanny.

In visual terms, Bewitched is unmistakably a noir. The influence is not superficial. It is structural. The city is a trap. Light betrays. The past will not stay buried. There is a sequence—Joan running under streetlamps, breathless and pursued by nothing but her own dread—that could be spliced into any urban noir of the period without a seam.

The camera angles tilt, distort. Clocks tick ominously. Mirrors reflect without comfort. There is a constant awareness of time, of fate, of moral entrapment.

In terms of American history, Bewitched occupies a fascinating position. The film emerges from a nation in transition. The war is closing. The future is unclear. The psychiatric frame that structures the plot mirrors the country’s own desire to explain itself, to analyze its trauma, and to believe in the possibility of healing. 

The courtroom scenes, with their ponderous invocations of justice and guilt, speak not only to Joan’s personal crisis but to the national drama of reckoning. The trial is not just hers. It is America’s.

Joan, as played by Thaxter, is the ideal postwar woman: pale, gentle, docile. But fucking hell is the satire deep, with its laid out played out dose of female captivity. If she is not a prisoner in the home she is a prisoner within herself, an astonishing supernatural style of twist, that is made psychiatric by the sudden film noir craze of dealing with the mind in screen.

The image of the postwar wife is amazingly disrupted by the voice within. Karen, her double, is the repressed id. She is violent, sexual, assertive. She refuses to be wed, to be good, to be quiet. She murders the man who comes to claim her. 

That this eruption of feminine rage must be cured—literally erased through hypnosis—speaks volumes about the culture's attitude toward female autonomy. Karen must be destroyed so that Joan may marry, submit, and disappear into domesticity. The film, perhaps unintentionally, reveals the cost of conforming femininity.

Bewitched (1945), written and directed by Arch Oboler, emerges from the shadowed interstice between popular psychology and cinematic invention. A product of its time, it should not be regarded as a failed attempt at science, but rather as a cultural artifact, one which boldly attempts to visualize a psychological state that, in the 1940s, remained largely speculative. 

The film, based on Oboler’s own radio drama "Alter Ego," is not so much a didactic tract on dissociative identity disorder as it is an evocative meditation on the fragmented self.

The narrative of Joan Alris Ellis, portrayed with tensile fragility by Phyllis Thaxter, unfurls in a familiar noir cadence: disorientation, escape, encounter, crime, punishment, and purported resolution. But it is no mere noir pastiche. Rather, Oboler crafts an atmosphere heavy with dread, locating the menace not in gangsters or urban corruption, but in the psyche itself. The film dares to suggest that the greatest threat may be internal, a notion that both scandalized and fascinated wartime audiences.

Released in June 1945, only weeks before the end of World War II, Bewitched was issued into a world reeling from violence and shellshock. The cultural imagination had become preoccupied with trauma, particularly of the psychological variety. 

Returning veterans bore the invisible wounds of battle, and popular media turned increasingly toward representations of interiority. The psychoanalytic movement had taken hold of American consciousness, and Freudian terminology began its slow seep into lay discourse. Oboler, long enamored with psychological extremes on the radio, found in cinema a canvas for his theories and anxieties. Bewitched capitalized on these currents.

The film opens not with a sense of joy, but with foreboding. Joan, on death row, awaits execution. Her story, told through flashbacks, aligns the viewer with the unreliability of her perspective. She is not merely a woman betrayed by circumstance; she is, in effect, betrayed by her own consciousness. This instability renders her narrative suspect and her perception fragile. When she hears a second voice—sinister, commanding, seductive—the audience is left not to question its reality but to dread its consequences. This voice, supplied with velvet menace by Audrey Totter, becomes the dark undercurrent of the film. That Totter is never seen but only heard is a formal gesture of remarkable restraint, although it denies the film an opportunity for visual duality. One senses the missed potential of a true cinematic doubling, a visual echo to match the sonic.

The voice calls itself Karen, and her emergence shatters Joan's placid exterior. Joan flees her family, her fiance, and her Midwestern life to take up a new identity in New York City, a classic noir move: the escape from innocence into urban complexity. There she becomes a cigarette girl, falling into a romance with Stephen McNally's Eric Russell, an attorney of decorous affections and limited imagination. The voice persists. Karen is not content to remain a whisper. She commands Joan to murder, and Joan obeys.

The act—the stabbing of her former fiance—is stylized but not lurid. Oboler handles it with an almost gothic restraint, letting shadows and suggestion do the work of violence. Yet the implications are unmistakable. This is not simply a murder; it is the triumph of one self over another. The scissors, a domestic object turned instrument of death, acquire symbolic weight. They sever not only flesh but the illusion of wholeness.

The ensuing trial attempts to re-stitch the fabric of Joan's selfhood, but the film founders here in its desire to reconcile melodrama with psychological inquiry. Edmund Gwenn, as the kindly Dr. Bergson, delivers the requisite diagnosis, intones the necessary gravitas, and proposes a solution as pat as it is improbable. Hypnosis will do the trick. With stern language and rhythmic suggestion, he calls forth Karen, confronts her, and dispels her. Joan is restored.

This denouement, while consistent with the era's need for closure, reveals the film's central tension: it wishes to plumb the depths of madness, but it also fears the abyss. The exorcism of Karen is rendered not through agony or integration, but through a sanitized, almost spiritual ritual. It is closer to theology than psychiatry. This is cinema not as diagnosis, but as exorcism.

From a feminist vantage, the film is deeply fraught. Joan's descent into psychosis is not presented as the result of external trauma or abuse, but rather as a spontaneous eruption of inner evil. Karen, her alter ego, is aggressive, commanding, sexually transgressive—the qualities most vilified in women by midcentury moral codes. In this light, the film functions as a warning: deviation from docile femininity leads to madness and crime. That Karen is eventually eradicated and Joan rendered safe for reintegration into polite society reinforces the ideology of containment that governed the postwar period. Women must be healed, reabsorbed, their difference erased. Yet one might argue that Karen is also a figure of liberation, albeit a violent one. She voices the rage that Joan cannot articulate, the frustration with her proscribed life. Her destruction is a tragedy masquerading as triumph.

Visually, the film owes much to noir traditions. Charles Salerno Jr.'s cinematography is relentlessly chiaroscuro, favoring heavy shadows, low-key lighting, and night-swathed streets. One striking scene shows Joan running through a deserted street, the bulbs of old-fashioned lamps glowing like sentinels of judgment. The angles are canted, the interiors claustrophobic. Clocks appear repeatedly, their faces impassive, their ticking inexorable. Time, like identity, is fragmented. This visual style is not ornamental; it is metaphoric. It renders Joan's mental state not as a condition to be explained, but as a terrain to be inhabited.

That the film hails from MGM, a studio not known for its noir output, adds to its singularity. It lacks the grit of RKO or the fatalism of Warner Bros. Instead, its sheen of polish only amplifies the horror beneath. The surface is too smooth, the people too clean, the rooms too orderly. Into this order, madness erupts. The aesthetic dissonance is productive.

The cultural history of the United States in 1945 forms an essential backdrop to Bewitched. The war had both revealed and intensified anxieties about identity, control, and rupture. Soldiers returned from Europe and the Pacific altered by what they had seen. Civilians, particularly women, faced a recalibration of roles as they were expected to relinquish wartime labor for domesticity. The individual, once anchored by community, found himself or herself adrift in an atomized postwar world. Bewitched reflects these shifts. Joan's psychic breakdown mirrors a national uncertainty. Who are we, now that the war is over? What lives within us, unspoken and unacknowledged?

Bewitched also belongs to a burgeoning tradition of psychological cinema. Though primitive in its understanding of mental illness, it anticipates a host of films that would follow: Lizzie (1957), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Psycho (1960), and beyond. It initiates a subgenre within noir that displaces external threat with internal chaos. The criminal is no longer the gangster but the self.

The radio origins of the piece are impossible to ignore. The dialogue is unnaturally verbose, expository, and often delivered with a cadence that presumes a blind listener. But Oboler, for all his indulgence, also understands the power of the voice. Audrey Totter's performance, confined to audio, is unforgettable. She whispers, she mocks, she seduces. She is the id personified. Her disembodiment makes her more menacing, not less. This is not Karen the woman; it is Karen the symptom, the presence, the ghost.

Phyllis Thaxter, often overlooked in critical discourse, delivers a performance of considerable nuance. She must act both as herself and as the vessel for another. Her eyes do much of the work: vacillation, confusion, dread. In a lesser film, her role might be reduced to screaming and swooning. Here, she must suggest a rift that is invisible. She does so with remarkable restraint.

Edmund Gwenn, best known for his avuncular roles, brings gravitas to the film's moral center. His Dr. Bergson is part Freud, part priest. His diagnosis is less medical than metaphysical. He speaks of the soul as much as the psyche. His hypnosis is not a clinical tool, but a ritual of redemption.

The resolution of the film, for all its dramatic convenience, cannot dispel the questions it raises. If Joan was not responsible, then who was? If Karen is gone, is she gone forever? Can the self be so easily divided and so neatly reassembled? These questions hover over the ending like spectres. The film may close with light, but the shadows remain.

Film noir is the story of American film history, Bewitched occupies a liminal space in that history, both histories. It could hardly be more instructive. Too strange for mainstream prestige, too refined for exploitation, it is a harbinger of the psychological thrillers that would proliferate in the following decades. It signals a shift from the external to the internal, from the criminal act to the mental compulsion. In this, it is both ahead of its time and utterly of its time.

That it is remembered at all is a testament to its unnerving potency. It lingers not because it explains mental illness, but because it renders madness as a cinematic form. Joan's disintegration is not pathologized, but dramatized. The mind becomes a labyrinth, and film the only medium suited to its contours.

Bewitched may not be accurate, but it is precise. It knows what it wants to evoke: the dread of being haunted not by a ghost, but by oneself. In its most compelling moments, it achieves a terrible poetry. The voice in Joan's head is not otherworldly; it is deeply human. It is what we fear we are capable of.

Thus, Oboler's flawed, excessive, and often overwrought film deserves its place in the noir canon. It substitutes moral ambiguity with psychic terror, swaps crime for compulsion, and dares to suggest that the true femme fatale lives not across a smoky bar, but behind one's own eyes.

The performances range from serviceable to astonishing. Thaxter, in particular, is remarkable. Her face becomes a battleground. Her eyes register confusion, terror, resignation. She speaks softly, but the fear behind her words is palpable.

Gwenn, too, offers a kind of patriarchal calm—the rational father who diagnoses, explains, and redeems. Stephen McNally, as the love interest, is a cipher. The romance is purely functional. It exists to heighten the stakes, to provide a contrast to Joan’s disorder.

Audrey Totter, unseen but omnipresent, dominates. Her voice is honeyed poison. It mocks, seduces, taunts. Totter would go on to play some of the greatest femmes fatales in noir—in Tension, The Set-Up, and Lady in the Lake. 

Her presence here, even in absentia, solidifies Bewitched within the noir tradition. She is the fatal woman split and internalized, the dangerous dame as voice in the head.

Oboler, for all his flaws, deserves credit for daring. His background in radio shows in both strengths and weaknesses. The dialogue is often stiff, but the pacing is tight. The film's mood is carefully cultivated. Oboler may lack finesse, but he has conviction. He wants to show something terrifying. And in moments, he succeeds.

There are sequences of real power. Joan huddled in a doorway, lit from above, shivering not from cold but from inner torment. A voice in the darkness telling her to kill. The final hypnosis scene, ridiculous in its science, nonetheless chilling in its imagery: a good self and bad self battling for supremacy in the void of the mind.

That the film is a B-picture does not diminish its impact. On the contrary, its modest production seems to grant it license to experiment. Oboler and cinematographer Salerno make the most of limited sets, using shadow and light to distort, to suggest. There are no grand locations, no sweeping shots. The world is claustrophobic, just as Joan's mind is. Doors close. Windows are shuttered. Escape is illusory.

What Bewitched (1945) reveals, above all, is a cultural moment in which psychiatry, noir, and gender politics converged in uneasy alliance. The film does not fully understand the illness it portrays, but it understands fear. It understands repression. It understands how terror can be made visual, vocal, manifest. It is not accurate, but it is true.

The courtroom fantasy sequence—lifted almost intact from Stranger on the Third Floor—is a marvel of quick cut, sozzled angle, fade and merge superimposed imagery denotive of anxiety, fear, the future, the news, the mind gone crazy. Stylized, theatrical, surreal.

It places Joan's trial outside time and law, suggesting that what is being judged is not a crime but a soul. In this space, justice is ambiguous, mercy arbitrary. The dreamlike mise-en-scène indicts rationalism even as the plot pretends to affirm it.

Oboler's direction is not subtle and in the unsubtle finds nuance. Reaction shots are used like flash cards. The tone veers toward melodrama of course, but not by much. And there is a sincerity, a commitment to the subject, that compels. The film is not camp. It is conviction misaligned with knowledge. And in that gap, something strange and fascinating emerges.

The ending is the film’s weakest moment. The good self triumphs. The bad self is gone. The doctor is triumphant. All is well. But the shadows say otherwise. The camera lingers a moment too long. Joan smiles, but it is not a smile that reassures. The possibility remains that Karen is not dead, only dormant.

Bewitched does not belong to the pantheon of great noirs, nor is it a psychiatric milestone. But it is a haunted film. Haunted by the limits of its understanding. Haunted by the fears it cannot name. Haunted by a voice, feminine and furious, that refuses to be silenced.

In its fumbling way, it tells the story of a woman torn between roles, identities, futures. It asks a question it cannot answer: What happens when a person contains two truths, one of which must be denied? The answer it gives is glib. But the asking remains.

As a contribution to noir, Bewitched is significant. It brings the genre inward. The enemy is not a gangster or a corrupt system. The enemy is within. The femme fatale is not a lover, but the self. This inversion deepens the genre's themes of doom, duplicity, and fatalism.

In the wider arc of American cinema, the film is an outlier but also a precursor. It anticipates the psychological thrillers of later decades. It lays groundwork for The Three Faces of Eve, Psycho, and meme, we must say it, admit it, Fight Club. It is a film that fails nobly, and in failing, creates something original.

But men are everywhere. Phyllis' character flees marriage and hides out in New York, running from her life, her man and her impending suction into suburban life. The first thing that happens is that she meets another man and does not seem immune.

Stephen McNally courts hard, does not give up, and soon they are on a date, and McNally has broken into noir, albeit as a cartoon pad of handsomeness, billed as Horace.

That it was released in the same year as the atomic bomb is not incidental. It speaks to an age of ruptures, of invisible horrors, of minds torn apart. Joan's private apocalypse mirrors the world’s.

Bewitched (1945) is not a masterpiece but it is still a classic film noir, because it is a ghost. It as like says more about film noir than many more famous movies, and it may well also distill the noir to a fine dripping black minute by minute infusion of the essence of the stuff. A classic paranoid woman film for certain.

Bewitched (1945)

Directed by Arch Oboler

Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Film Noir  |   Release Date - Jul 4, 1945  |   Run Time - 65 min.