Magic In Manhattan: The Bewitching Pleasures Of Bell, Book And Candle

The hip, witchy cult favourite remains one of the great overlooked films of the 1950s, despite a curiously conservative attitude at its heart.

Bell, Book and Candle has been somewhat overlooked by critics and fans alike over the years, despite an impressively big-name cast topped by the two stars of the same year’s Vertigo – or perhaps because of that. It’s certainly a film that would feel more trivial to the Hitchcock film for many critics – a supernatural romantic comedy, the sort of thing that demands not to be taken seriously. And it’s a film with its fair share of flaws, not least of which is the central subtext that runs unmentioned but consistently throughout the narrative. Despite that, I believe this to be a key text of the time, one very much of the time while having a timeless appeal. I love this film unashamedly and as I’m going to discuss all the problems with it, I think I should be upfront and say that despite all of this, I can (and do) watch this film over and over again, enjoying it more each time. We should never be blind to the faults of the things we love – but those faults do not mean that we can’t still love them unconditionally. Every criticism that I make of the film below should come with the proviso that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. This is one of my favourite movies and nothing is going to change that.

The film, based on the play by John Van Druton, tells the story of the unlikely – in fact, magically created – romance between Gillian (with a hard G) Holroyd (Kim Novak) and Shep Henderson (James Stewart). Holroyd is a witch who uses her powers to enter Henderson, partly because of a feud with his bride-to-be Merle (Janice Rule) and partly because she is bored. Invariably, the romance becomes real for her and Shep finds out that he has been bewitched, leading to break-up and reunion. That’s the plot in basic terms.

But what really runs throughout the film as a none-too-subtle subtext is the demand for conformity that everyone pushes onto Gillian. We first see her complaining to her cat/familiar Pyewacket about the humdrum existence of her life and her desire to break free and do something different. That ‘different’ is Shep, the middle-aged book publisher who lives upstairs and we can appreciate that he is at least completely removed from her usual circle of witches and beatniks. Nevertheless, it’s an unconvincing romance that develops– rather more so than in Vertigo – because Shep is so boringly straight and Stewart is just too old – he was 50 at the time that the film was made, twice the age of Novak, and while age-gap relationships were not uncommon in films of the time (and I’m certainly making no moral judgement on them now), it seems as though the story was written for someone younger. The film could get away with him being an older man or a bit of a strait-laced dullard, but not both. It’s one thing for Gillian to want someone outside her usual circle, but a stuffy older man (and Stewart’s character seems considerably older than 50, despite the best efforts of the film) seems a real stretch – especially when her passing fancy and magical enchantment turns to true love. In all fairness, Stewart himself was aware that this sort of character no longer worked for him and decided afterwards that this would be his last romantic lead role.

But let’s get back to the issue of conformity. Throughout the film, Gillian is expected to fit into a role rather than be an individual. This was the 1950s of course, when social conformity was still very much the thing, but the intriguing thing here is how these demands cross from ‘straight’ society to the alternative subterranean world of the Beats and the Witches. Shep wants Gillian to settle down and marry him, presumably for a life as a domestic housewife; her friends and family want her to abandon this flirtation with ‘humanity’ (witches in this film are presented as a different species but that is never really explained convincingly and seems to be a concept that comes and goes as the plot demands). The movie’s ‘happy’ ending sees Gillian finally giving in to normality – her black and red clothes swapped for bland pastel dresses, her shop of ethnographical art replaced with displays of more traditionally feminine pretty sea shells. Having lost her powers by falling in love, she has now been tamed and so Shep is happy to reunite with her. For many of us, the ending feels more like a tragedy, the triumph of dull conformity over individualism, as if witchcraft was just a phase like any other form of teenage self-expression, to be abandoned when you ‘grow up’. Even her arched eyebrows have been softened by the final scene, a subtle but notable moment that tells us there is no going back for her.

The odd thing is that while the film wants to portray this as a happy ending and a positive change, Gillian seems broken and lost. While we are supposed to believe that this is due to a broken heart over Shep, it’s notable that throughout the film until this point, she has been cool and stylish, sexually self-confident and effortlessly self-aware, feisty and in control. But now she is the traditional 1950s housewife-in-waiting, made to abandon everything in much the same way that women of the era often gave up work and ambition to concentrate on being a housewife and mother. She no longer fits in with her former community and has been effectively ostracised (at one point Nicky tells Queenie that she should just come back to the fold but there is no suggestion that repentance will return her powers to her, meaning that she would be just as much a miserable misfit in that community as she undoubtedly will be in 1950s suburbia), made to conform to what the filmmakers – and what they presumed would be their audience – thought of as ‘normal’ behaviour. I’m not sure that marriage to Shep – a man who only really loves her once she has repented her ‘sins’ and become traditional marriage material – would ultimately make her happy, despite what the film wants us to believe. Frankly, even Merle, who the film perhaps unfairly wants us to see as a stuck-up bitch even though her later scenes suggest a dry sense of humour and a taste for experimental art, seems too good for him – their break-up is a lucky escape for her.

Bell, Book and Candle’s high spots mostly take place in the Zodiac Club, the underground hangout of Gillian, her brother Nicky (Jack Lemmon) and Aunt Queenie (Elsa Lanchester). This Beatnik haunt is one of the best representations of the scene as it existed at the time that has been seen on any film, simply because it is not about Beatniks as such – the Zodiac is a witch hang out, albeit one that seems to be open to anyone (and so we are never quite sure who is a witch, who is a Beat and who is just as passing acquaintance like writer Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), whose plans for a book on ‘Magic in Manhattan’ is the trigger for almost all the film’s events. Beatnik clubs are rarely very cool in movies but this one seems to get it. The bongo-driven music of the Brothers Candoli, the frantic performance of “Le Noyé Assassiné” by Philippe Clay and the mood lighting that dominates give this a sense of time and place – while also feeling weirdly timeless. The cool kids would still want to go to a club like this. The scenes in The Zodiac are also notable for the clever use of lighting, the washing of the characters’ faces with a green hue that brings to mind the classic cartoon image of the witch from The Wizard of Oz and such, without ever being too overt about it. The only club regular who isn’t lit like this is Gillian – perhaps because Kim Novak is the star and needs to be shown in romanticised lighting, but perhaps because the film is reminding us that she doesn’t quite fit in with this crowd, any more than with the normal world above. She’s a step removed already, effortlessly cool even as everyone else tries that bit too hard. When Shep and Merle pay a fleeting Christmas Eve visit to the club, they too stand out from everyone else – Shep in his stiff suit and bow tie, Merle in her bright green dress (green for envy, as becomes clear). This is not their world any more than his ordinary life above is Gillian’s.

Gillian is, throughout, the coolest of the cool, an effortless style icon dressed in black and red (with a touch of leopard print), often shoeless – and if she does wear shoes, it seems a sop to societal demands (or a practical desire to avoid the cold of the snow). Significantly, the cause of Gillian and Merle’s animosity stems from the latter anonymously reporting the former for not wearing shoes in class during their time at college. Equally significantly, we later see Shep putting her shoes on her feet – an early sign that, bewitched and besotted or not, he will not be standing for any of this awkward individualism from her. She is barefooted a lot in the film and the last time is when she chases the errant Pyewacket into the snowy street, her powers already gone and her familiar no longer belonging to her. Bare feet in this film seem to represent a freedom of spirit and it is no wonder that the ‘norms’, from Merle in college to Shep now, want to crush that.

For all its cultural faults, Bell, Book and Candle remains a remarkable film, a brilliant film that I can watch and overlook everything until after the film is over, wallowing in its warmth, charm and beauty. It is an underrated key movie of the late 1950s and one of the great unsung Christmas films, with the first half of the film taking place on Christmas Eve. The eerie score by George Duning, the extraordinary visual palate and the humour that ranges from broad to subtle (it’s in the broader moments where Stewart, a fine physical comedian, comes into his own). It allows the supporting cast (which also includes Hermoine Gingold as a Grand Dame witch who sees Gillian as a younger, more powerful threat and who ‘cures’ Shep at a price) to build multi-faceted characters and Richard Quine’s direction allows both the romance and the humour to work alongside each other. You might not be convinced that this is a real romance, but of course, for much of the film it isn’t supposed to be – and the sense of Shep’s bewitched infatuation and Gillian’s internal struggle as she slowly falls in love is effectively handled. Novak is the film’s high point – she was the third choice after Lilli Palmer and Grace Kelly, but you can’t imagine anyone else pulling this off. She has the timeless sense of cool that makes the film still work today and you have to wonder just how much of a dullard Shep must have been not to fall for her immediately and unquestioningly, magic or not. Imagine going to another witch to break her spell over you, as he does once he realises what has happened – what a stuffed shirt he is.

The film wasn’t the hit that people expected at the time and has been generally dismissed by critics who even now seem to dislike it for not being Vertigo – as well as many who, more understandably, struggle to get past the whole conformity message. It’s still effectively missing in action on Blu-ray, at least in the sort of edition that it deserves. Nevertheless, the film managed to have an ongoing influence – the hugely popular 1960s TV show Bewitched was inspired by both this and I Married a Witch (a 1942 film that also has a conformist man in a relationship with a flirty witch, though there is no taming her in this case or in the TV show, where Samantha’s witchy powers are a constant source of embarrassment and terror for her husband – in that sense, the show does what the film doesn’t, allowing her to have her cake and eat it as both witch and suburban housewife), effectively being a sit-com sequel to both stories. Pleasingly, more and more people seem to be coming around to its pleasures in recent years. It has become a cult film within fashionista and witchcraft circles (the latter being able to overlook the ending as an enforced establishment compromise of the time) and when you watch it today (as we do once a year) the underbelly of the film still feels very modern – the underground occultism, the alternative beliefs and the cool jazz does not seem so far removed from the alternative culture of today.

And notably – this is rightly seen as one of the few classic cat movies. Cats have had rather a hard time of it compared to dogs in the cinema, often portrayed as villains and monsters by filmmakers who probably have the same love of conformity and obedience as Shep Henderson does. But this film feels essentially feline even without the presence of Pyewacket (the cat whom our own office junior is named after), and he is perhaps the real central character, sitting in judgment over everyone and certainly not impressed by the idea of compromise and conformity. Pyewacket’s abandonment of Gillian is the first sign that she has lost her powers – he remains fiercely individual throughout and as well as being part of the most iconic image of the movie – the shot of Gillian and Pye staring witchily into the camera as the spell over Shep is cast – he’s the final thing that we see in the movie, looking imperious and contemptuous atop a lamp post. As Nicky says, “he’s a cool cat”. Amen to that.

DAVID FLINT

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