FANTASIA OBSCURA: Romero’s Forgotten Witchy Woman
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you come to realize that when they threw around the words “New” and “Improved” during the 1970s, that just wasn’t the case …
Season of the Witch (fka Hungry Wives, fka Jack’s Wife) (1973)
Distributed by: Jack H. Harris Enterprises
Directed by: George A. Romero
Sometimes, you have what you think is a good idea, that gets worked and re-worked a few times, that just doesn’t quite give you what you want or need.
Case in point:
Which had started out being known earlier as:
These two trailers are for the same film, with different focuses as to what occurs in the same work.
We start off with a scene, as the credits play over it, of a woman, who we find out later is Joan Mitchel (Jan White in her first feature) walking behind a man, her husband Jack (Bill Thurnhurst in the first of his two appearances on film, the second for Romero’s The Crazies). She’s a few paces behind him as he walks ahead, drinking coffee and reading his copy of the Wall Street Journal. Joan is wearing what has to be the ugliest housecoat ever made in 1972, blues and purples spattered like a peacock that became roadkill; this detail becomes important as we move along.
We watch as Jack pushes aside branches that swing back and scar Joan as she tries to get him to notice her. Joan also sees herself to the side in white, on a swing, which Jack likewise ignores…
…before we see Joan in bed, stirred by sounds Jack makes as he readies himself for one of his frequent trips for business out of town. Joan falls back asleep, and we see her in the ugly housecoat again, being driven by Jack to a kennel, where he puts her on a leash to lead her to an outdoor pen to have her housed while he’s out of town.
The reason the housecoat is called out is that it’s an indicator that we’re watching a dream; every time we see her in it, we know that she’s dreaming, which becomes important to the story as we proceed between Joan’s nightmares and her ugly waking world.
After she has an unfulfilling session with her psychologist (Neil Fisher in his only acting gig), she ends up at one of those boozy suburban get-togethers the decade’s infamous for (you know, like depicted in The Ice Storm). She’s in the corner with the other wives of the neighborhood, gossiping while drinking, which then and is always two things you should never do at the same time…
Out of the conversation, Joan finds out from the snarky circle about Marion Hamilton (Virginia ‘Ginger’ Greenwald in her only credited role) who admits to being a witch. Interested, Joan convinces her friend Shirley (Ann Muffly in her first feature role) to drive out to see her, where Shirley picks up from Marion a tarot reading and Joan picks up from her a copy of the book To Be a Witch: A Primer, which she starts to read casually.
Returning from Marion’s, Joan and Shirley finds Joan’s daughter Nikki (Joedda McClain in her only credited role) in the living room with her boyfriend, sociology adjunct Gregg Williamson (Raymond ‘Ray’ Laine). They get to talking about whether to believe in witchcraft, which devolves into Gregg playing a trick on Shirley, using the power of suggestion to convince her that a re-rolled plain cigarette is a joint. He tries to trick her into thinking that she’s tried pot, with the hope that having her thinking her mind was expanded would do her wonders, while Joan and Nikki think this is cruel.
(Insert legalization in Pennsylvania joke here…)
Things get worse after Shirley feels foolish. After Joan rebuffs Gregg for his subtle suggestions that he might want to get intimate with her, she can hear Gregg and Nikki going at it with each other from Nikki’s bedroom. Joan’s reaction is to touch herself in time with the sounds, getting herself aroused, which Nikki walks in on her as she’s doing that. Disgusted, Nikki runs away from home, and Jack takes the news badly, at one point striking Joan.
From there, Joan decides to read To Be a Witch: A Primer more intently, going all in at that point:
(Note: Donovan’s single used in that scene came out six years before the film was made, and was in earlier cuts of the film before the movie shared the same title with the song.)
Joan then starts on her new pursuit, following the directions in the book and Marion’s advice in order to work better with the Craft. We get scenes where Romero’s research for another unfinished project, which one can see has basis in real life rituals, gets used by Joan, but we never get a full sense of whether the rituals were essential or coincidental. Her getting Gregg as a ‘diversion’ could have been from her summoning ritual, or the fact that she called him afterwards on the phone and he was more than willing to come on over; both are likely explanations of what takes place.
In terms of conjuring this film, this was not an entirely happy production for Romero. His other witch project that he abandoned was used for parts to pull into a separate one, which came about he claimed after learning about the women’s liberation movement while working at WQED. While his research and understanding of witchcraft shows here, his not entirely firm grasp on the nuances of feminism also comes to the fore; even by the standards of the 1970s, some of the dialog in the screenplay he wrote and how he frames those shots feel tone deaf and a little embarrassing.
How much of it was Romero’s grasp of the subject, and how much the results of the strained production, are hard to separate. First being made under the title of Jack’s Wife, the film’s budget was cut during production from $250,00 to only $100,000 (a little less than $500,000 in today’s dollars). During the shoot, the money people on the film suggested that Joan and Gregg’s lovemaking be shot more explicitly as softcore porn, which Romero refused to do; so, maybe he wasn’t as tone deaf on that other topic as we thought…?
Poster for first theatrical release
Before release, Romero had to cut the run time of the film from 130 minutes down to 90, which may also account for some of the rough spots in terms of the story. The first theatrical release under the title Hungry Wives in 1973 was promoted as softcore porn despite Romero refusing to go that route, which got bad notices and box office. This was not a high point in his career, and considering what was being asked of him it’s easy to blame the back office people. (This is most likely one of the main reasons Romero and company formed Laurel Distribution for Martin, a film that like this one tries to leave it ambiguous as to whether we’re seeing actual otherworldly forces or just coincidence.)
After Dawn of the Dead became a sensation in 1978, the film gets re-titled to Season of the Witch and gets another theatrical window, trying to play up Joan’s pursuit of witchcraft, without having the whole ‘consciousness raising’ theme getting in the way. Which was also a mistake; as imperfect a metaphor as it was presented, it was still intrinsic to the plot and could not be so blithely cast aside.
It’s an admittedly flawed work, one that no matter who is most responsible for its shortcomings, Romero acknowledged was not great. Even with good performances, especially White’s, there’s not much to see here in the midst of the mess. For the rest of his life, Romero discussed trying to re-make the film, preferably under its first title. Considering how the re-visits to his Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead turned out, it’s difficult to guess how that would have gone.
It’s hard to conjure with our thoughts what magic they’d have needed to use to liberate the original from itself…
NEXT TIME: This remake benefited from things that were not available to the original film, like ‘sound’ and ‘color’ and ‘the statute of limitations’…
