Last week, a movie version of the classic TV show Bewitched, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, opened to mostly dismal reviews and mediocre box office. Film adaptations of old TV shows have been subject to the law of diminishing returns for quite some time now, so it's not necessarily a surprise that Bewitched is a failure. Of all the things that director and co-writer Nora Ephron did wrong, though, the most glaring is her misunderstanding of the core relationship between witch Samantha and mortal Darrin.
The film has its traditional romantic comedy setup, with Samantha stand-in Isabel pursuing Darrin stand-in Jack, overcoming obstacles and misunderstandings to end up in a completely unbelievable love affair. On the show, Samantha and Darrin's courtship was handled in the first third of the pilot episode, leaving the meat of the show to be about what Ephron completely ignores on screen: the sexiness of marriage. Even though Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) always assured Darrin (Dick York and later Dick Sargent) that all she wanted was to give up her witchy ways and become the all-American housewife, you could tell that what Darrin found most alluring and attractive about Samantha was her command of the supernatural.
The fact is, no matter how many unflattering hausfrau outfits she might have worn, Elizabeth Montgomery was hot. Even as Darrin protested that this had to be the last time Samantha would use her powers, we knew that, deep down, he couldn't wait for another chance for her to transform one of his clients into a dog or conjure up a spell to clean the house. Samantha twitching her nose was the most arousing sight in the world. If she could do all those things around the house, imagine what she could do in the bedroom.
It's no coincidence that Darrin and Samantha were one of the first TV couples to share a bed. Although on the surface it seemed like Darrin was in charge, always chastising Samantha for frivolously using her powers and going to work while Samantha stayed at home rearing children, Samantha was always the one with the power. Darrin could scold her all he wanted, but he couldn't ever actually prevent her from using her powers. If she wanted, Samantha could conjure up all the creature comforts she'd ever need, and not have to rely on her husband to earn a single cent. Darrin was clearly the submissive in the relationship, working long hours under the unforgiving eye of Larry Tate to earn money his wife didn't even need.
It was this strange undercurrent of dominance and submission, the sexual charge of witchcraft, that enthralled me to Bewitched when I first saw it in reruns on Nick at Nite as a preteen. There was something about Samantha's power, about the raw female energy buried under that demure housewife exterior, that was alluring in ways I didn't understand at the time. To an adolescent boy, women are as inscrutable as witches, and hold as much unpredictable power. Unlike Barbara Eden's genie on I Dream of Jeannie, to whom she was often unfavorably compared, Samantha was not a slave nor naïve bimbo; she was a sensuous, independent woman who made her own decisions, and she'd as soon turn you into a frog as look at you. That was my kind of woman.
Giving up her powers and position in the witches' world for a traditional mortal life of domesticity may have seemed to some like an anti-feminist act on Samantha's part, but really she was several steps ahead of the women's movement: Coming from a background of independence and nontraditional family structure, Samantha reclaimed the housewife role on her own terms, making an informed choice that was dictated by no one other than herself. She never did what Darrin told her unless it was also what she wanted, and she spent eight seasons fighting her own mother for the right to stay home, rear children and cook dinner for her husband—it was a strangely radical act.
Through those eight seasons, two Darrins and increasingly recycled plots, Samantha remained as feisty as ever. Her doppelganger cousin Serena (also played by Montgomery) got to be more free-spirited and capture more of the sexual-revolution vibe of the time, and clearly she was meant to represent another facet of Samantha's personality that the writers weren't able to fit into the character's housewife framework. While the chemistry between Samantha and Darrin decreased as time went on and York left the show, the twitch of Montgomery's nose never lost its excitement.
Kidman's naïve little girl performance in the new film left me cold, though, and Ferrell's Jack Wyatt was not nearly as gloriously sexually screwed up as either Darrin. Revisiting the show's first season on the newly-released DVD, the allure of the original Samantha came back full force, pulling me in again to my fascination with this powerful, mysterious and undeniably sexual woman. That twitch still does it for me.