Review of Bell, Book and Candle (1958) by Gregg D — 19 Jun 2010

Apparently, Witches Are Just Funny.

This movie contains one of the bits of folklore about witches which has always bothered me. I'd never heard the "no blushing or crying" bit--it sounds as though it would have been hard to get any convictions if people really believed that, especially given the torture thing leading up to convictions. But anyway. The one which has always bothered me is the idea that witches float, and that's how you can tell they're witches. I mean, if we were chimpanzees, that might make some sense. However, humans float. It's what we do. Our body fat percentage is such that you'd have to have lost more weight than is probably healthy to sink instead. Oh, I suppose the heavy clothes of certain historical eras could have tipped the balance enough; Elizabeth I's courtiers would not have floated, especially the women. But in a modern setting, it's really just sloppy research.

Shepherd "Shep" Henderson (Jimmy Stewart) is an ordinary guy. A publisher. He moves into a new apartment, only to find out his neighbours are a little off when one of them, Aunt Queenie (Elsa Lanchester), appears in his apartment while he's out. She lives upstairs; downstairs is Gillian (hard "G") Holroyd (Kim Novak). Shep brings his date, Merle Kittredge (Janice Rule) to the club where the Holroyds, including Cousin Nicky (Jack Lemmon), are spending Christmas Eve. It turns out Gil, as she calls herself, knew Merle in school. Merle had been a petty, malicious girl who actively went after other girls' boyfriends; she had written a letter to campus authorities about Gil's tendency to go to class barefoot. (Which I did sometimes, but no one at Evergreen cared.) Out of a combination of spite, concern for Shep, and even genuine interest, she casts a spell on Shep which makes him reject Merle and go for her instead. Hilarity, of course, ensues.

Jimmy Stewart turned fifty during the making of this movie, but he seems younger here than in a certain other movie he made with Kim Novak that same year, the last one he made with Hitchcock--though it's true that Hitch blamed the movie's relative box office failure on Stewart's being too old and switched to Cary Grant for a leading man. (Why Novak only worked with him the once, I cannot say.) He still seems a bit old for Novak to become crazy about right away, especially with everyone acting as though the only issue there is her being a witch. Oh, Elsa Lanchester seems old, but she's supposed to; Kim Novak was two when Lanchester played the Bride. Stewart was only six years younger than Lanchester, though, a fact which I guess we were all supposed to ignore. Cary Grant, who actively campaigned for the part, was actually four years older than Stewart, but I don't think Stewart ever felt like a dreamboat, and we talked last week about how movies failed when they didn't observe that part of Cary Grant's persona.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but it felt as though the movie expected us to take certain of its witchcraft mythos details for granted, to make us all feel as though we were sure we'd heard them somewhere before. And, yes, we've discussed the sinking not-witches one, and the term "warlock" predates the movie by at least four hundred years, give or take a decade. But I'd never before heard that witches neither blush nor shed tears, and I'd certainly never heard that a witch who falls in love loses her powers. I'm also a little perplexed by the idea of a witch's being an anthropology major at School I Can't Remember But Am Pretty Sure Was Prestigious, but never mind. We pass on that one. And, sure, most stories of this sort require a certain amount of going along with their worldview, but the implication I got was that this stuff was all common knowledge in our world, as well, or at least supposed to be. Maybe it was fifty years ago and I'm the one who's out of the loop.

All in all, a light film. The ending is remarkably saccharine, as well as being a little abrupt. Stewart feels less a Creepy Old Man in this than he did that same year as Scottie Ferguson, and he did get the practically trademarked "Everyman Out of His Depth" thing Stewart did so well. However, I didn't like the breathy voice Novak did through the whole picture, and I'm not entirely sure what Jack Lemmon was doing there at all. I guess they felt the witch society was an important aspect to the story, including the book that Nicky was writing with Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), but they hovered around the border of too much information while simultaneously not giving enough in other areas. I also kept waiting for Stewart's secretary, Tina (Bek Nelson), to turn out to be a witch as well. All in all, cute but vaguely unsatisfying. If you're looking for a lazy movie with which to pass an afternoon, one which won't take up too much brainpower, you can't go far wrong here.