The seedling of hope that there might really be witches living among the multitudes of humanity was planted in this man's heart at a very early age by a black and white movie on a flickering television set in a basement in Nebraska. I was perhaps nine at the time, a precocious lad, brought up in a household where the belief in invisible beings was encouraged by my fun-loving and imaginative young parents in the heady years immediately after the ordeals of World War II. For the longest time, our basement was inhabited by a purple elephant named "Woocile," which only my father could see clearly, but whose presence was acknowledged (with a bit of a thrill for my little sister and me) by everyone. Fairies were also frequent visitors to our home and would leave little gifts for us children that were pretty easy to find, with a little prompting from our mother on occasion.
It was a long summer afternoon and just my mother and I were home, watching our then-new, very first television set in the relative cool of the basement, when the midday movie came on. The movie that day was I Married a Witch, starring Cecil Kellaway and Veronica Lake as a delightfully wicked father-daughter pair of Salem-era witches whose tree-entrapped souls are released into the modern world by a fortuitous bolt of lightning. Directed by the French Surrealist Rene Clair, who had been taking refuge in Hollywood in 1942, this magickal tale absolutely captivated my prepubescent imagination and literally changed the course of my life in one enchanted afternoon.
As Irish reviewer Darragh O'Donoghue writes for Amazon.com: "Lake's magic in this case is not simply the fantasy of genre, but a genuine transformative power, a spiritual enchantment, an offer of freedom through new insight, new sight." Veronica Lake is, of course, better known for her many film noir roles in such classics as This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key. Her appearance in the title role of the complex, unusual, and delightful romantic comedy I Married a Witch was my first exposure to her sparkling charm, and between her portrayal of the witch, Jennifer, and Kellaway's hilarious turn as her roguish warlock dad, my concept of "witch" changed forever -- from "Hansel and Gretel" inspired fear, to curiosity. "What if there really are witches? I want to meet one!"
A couple years later came Bell, Book and Candle, which I saw when it came out as a holiday movie in 1958. I found the script for Bell Book and Candle, the Broadway play, in our public library soon after seeing the movie, and I would guess I read the play 20 times over the ensuing years -- always on the lookout, of course, for evidence of the existence of witches in the world around me.
"I want to meet one!"
You can imagine my delight when, years later, on a trip to Egypt, I met several! But that is another story....