Woman Who Came Back (1945)

Director: Walter Colmes

Writers: Dennis J. Cooper, John H. Kafka, Lee Williams

Composer: Edward H. Plumb

Starring: John Loder, Nancy Kelly, Otto Kruger, Ruth Ford, Harry Tyler, Jeanne Gail, Almira Sessions, J. Farrell MacDonald, Emmett Vogan

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Hate-filled eyes...Accusing fingers...Whispered words...All repeated this dread phrase..."LORNA WEBSTER IS A WITCH!"

Plot: After a bus accident, a woman comes to believe that she's actually a 300-year-old witch.

My rating:  6/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

SPOILERS AHEAD...YARRRRRR!!!

I've now seen three Nancy Kelly movies and this is the second one where she's paranoid as hell (the other being the wonderful, THE BAD SEED (1956).  She plays that well but when that's mostly what you see, it starts to wear thin by the finish line.  Now with the film, it's pretty good at stringing Lorna (Kelly), everyone around her, and us into thinking that she really is the embodiment of the witch that was burned at the stake (with her dog) 300 years earlier.  I dug the little things that happened to support that belief like her feeding a little girl's fish with rat poison knowing full well she gave them fish food.  It's morbid stuff like that that help sell me the goods.  Then in the final few minutes, her fiance and the old coot/town historian just happened to find hidden in an old desk, a 300 year old letter written by the man who sentenced the witch to death saying he coerced the simple woman to sign a confession just to satisfy the town's bloodlust.  The chase is on to keep Lorna from losing her shit completely and kill herself by jumping off a cliff and into the water below.  Her fiance, Dr. Matt Adams (Loder) dives in and saves her.  The final salt in the wound is a cheerful as hell, we-want-everyone-to-feel-happy-and-cheerful closing scene like you'd get at the end of a bad TV sitcom.  The picture was ruined for me from the moment the letter was discovered.  Everyone did such a fine job up until then.  It's a shame they ruined it with such a silly and insulting ending.  It would have been a little unusual in 1945 (especially in December, months after the close of the War) to end this on a dark note but that's how I feel about it.