Love Potions and Ancestral Curses

Want to know what great acting is? It’s when two actors who loathe each other in real life have to perform a convincing love scene on film. And watching I Married a Witch (1942) starring Veronica Lake and Fredric March, you’d never guess that this romantic duo feuded constantly during the making of the film. On the surface, I Married a Witch is a tale of the supernatural, played for laughs, and uses its premise to poke fun at American politics, the institution of marriage, and New England’s puritan ancestors.

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Basketball Jocks and Pom Pom Girls

Jane Fonda (in her film debut) and Anthony Perkins appear in a publicity still for the 1960 romantic comedy TALL STORY, directed by Joshua Logan.

The film debut of a soon-to-be-major movie star is not always an event of any significance when it first occurs. Nor is it often a movie with any artistic merit that can stand the test of time and become an important topic for analysis among film scholars. Jane Fonda’s movie debut, Tall Story, will surely never make the AFI’s top 100 films list and it wasn’t a commercial or critical success upon its release in 1960. Yet the film is important in the career arc of Ms. Fonda. It’s also an enjoyable, often witty romantic comedy that plays much better today than when it first premiered.

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