Bound Forever: Love Spells In Film & Television Part 1

Neely Edwards in Love Drops (1922) (AI-Generated)

 The recent release of Obsession has inspired me to review love potion stories in film and television.

The earliest known love potion film is a short British comedy called Marvelous Pacifier (1908).  The plot involves a husband and wife whose quarrelsome relationship is cured by a love potion.  The couple introduce the medicine to their meddling parents to spread the love. 

Marvelous Pacifier (1908) (AI-Generated)

Several other love potion films were produced within the next few years.  The films included A Surprising Powder (1909), The Love Potion (1911), The Poor Boob (1913), Willy Would A Wooing Go (1913), Liquid Love (1913) and Love Spots (1914).  

Willy Would A Wooing Go (1913) (AI-Generated)

The Love Potion has an interesting plot.  Walter Jones resides at the Brown's boarding house.  He annoys the young women at the boarding house with his persistent attention.  He reads an ad in the paper about a love potion which, when placed in the tea or coffee of a person, will cause the person to fall violently in love with to the next person they see.  The girls uncover Jones' love potion scheme.  When an actor arrives at the house, the girls suggest that he disguise as a woman and pretend to drink Walter's love potion. The actor agrees and madly attacks Walter for hugs and kisses.  Walter feels so ridiculed by the experience that he willingly leaves the house.  

The Love Potion (1911) (AI-Generated)

Many comedies of the time involved a mischievous boy coming up with a prank to cause chaos in his community.  Liquid Love followed this premise perfectly with a professor's son squirting people with a love-inducing liquid.

Liquid Love (1913) (AI-Generated)

Popular comedy duo Ham and Bud consent to having a love potion injected into their veins in Ham and The Experiment (1915).  The pair becomes so appealing to women that a horde of women chase them through the streets.  

A similar plot turned up seven years later in Love Drops (1922).   Neely Edwards, the star of Universal's popular "Nervy Ned" series, is at the center of the action.  A palm reader sells Ned a flask of love drops.  After consuming the love drops, Ned finds himself being pursued by a wide variety of women.  He is so irresistible that a bride interrupts her wedding ceremony to follow him.  This presents a greater problem when Ned learns that he will inherit his uncle's fortune if he can stay away from women for a year.  Motion Picture New gives away the ending:  "[Ned] takes refuge from his pursuers on a rock in the ocean, but is wooed by a mermaid." 

Love Drops (1922) (AI-Generated)

A Harem Knight (1926) is a quick-moving, gag-filled Mack Sennett comedy.  Motion Picture News pointed out that the film saves its love potion for its "disastrous denouement."  Notorious playboy Rodney St. Clair (Ben Turpin) is delighted to wander into a palace harem.  But the harem’s fattest and ugliest woman, Petunia (Louise Carver), spikes his drink with Dream Drops.  The drops don't make Rodney affectionate; rather, they make him groggy and submissive.  Though online sources refer to this  as a love potion, it really falls into the sedative category.

Ben Turpin in A Harem Knight (1926) (This photo is real!)

Love potions continued to turn up in a wide variety of films.

Vitaphone's color musical short King of The Islands (1936) features Warren Hymer as a shipwrecked sailor who uses a love potion to persuade an island princess, Princess Wini (Wini Shaw),  to marry him.  Hymer is happy at the end of the marriage ceremony until he learns that  he has married the volcano, not the princess.

Wini Shaw and Warren Hymer King of The Islands (1936) 

Thief of Baghdad (1961), a Steve Reeves fantasy-adventure, is set off by a love potion.  Princess Amina (Giorgia Moll) is inadvertently poisoned by a flawed love potion administered by an unworthy suitor. Rather than making her fall in love, the elixir makes her desperately ill.  The hero must embark on a dangerous quest to find the only antidote: a mythical blue rose.

Steve Reeves and Edy Vessel in Thief of Baghdad (1961)

Exotic Vitamins (1964) is a Greek bedroom farce which gets more chaotic and energetic when a love potion is introduced in the third act.  A young woman desperately in love with her womanizing cousin attempts to domesticate him by secretly dosing him with a cocktail of local herbs and traditional aphrodisiac love potions.

Veronica Lake cooking up a love potion in I Married a Witch (1942)

We will see in three upcoming video essays how love potions became increasingly dominant in American entertainment.

A love potion makes Herman Munster irresistible to women in the Munsters episode "My Fair Munster." 

I hope to see you again soon.