My Romance with Movies: From the 1950s: Bell, Book and Candle

1958 Romantic Comedy
From Columbia Pictures
Directed by Richard Quine

Starring
James Stewart
Kim Novak
Jack Lemmon
Ernie Kovacs
Elsa Lanchester
Hermione Gingold
Janice Rule
Bek Nelson
and
Pyewacket

I've always thought it was sprinkled with fairy dust, as magical a little treat as one could wish for. It is resplendent in charm, mirth and merriment, just as a tale of witchcraft should be.

Additionally I just didn't miss Kim Novak or Jimmy Stewart movies. It was just like seeing old friends together again since earlier in the same year they had completed work on Alfred Hitchcock's superior thriller, Vertigo... her best work and one of his.

Here is the perfectly silly but thoroughly entertaining piece about a modern-day Manhattan witch who runs a gallery featuring primitive art. Her Siamese cat, Pyewacket, is her roommate in the apartment they share attached to the back of her shop. In the apartments above her shop lives her rascally aunt (Lanchester), also a witch, and Stewart, a book publisher. Novak's in a rut with her life and wants to make a change although she's uncertain how to proceed.

With her supernatural powers and a yen she suddenly acquires for Stewart when he comes into the gallery to borrow her phone, she decides to inveigle him into falling in love with her without giving a lot of attention to the fact that she cannot love him back.

She hits an immediate roadblock when she not only meets Stewart's fiance (Rule) but the three of them end up in a smoky little coffeehouse where Novak's warlock brother (Lemmon) plays bongos as part of a quartet. The two women recognize one another from college days and recall their mutual hatred. Novak determines to use her sorcery to stop the marriage which is scheduled for the next day.

We meet two more characters in the form of Gingold, in a high-priestess sort of role, and Kovacs who plays a writer who wants Stewart to publish his book on witchcraft.

Stewart falls hard for Novak who now sees how her handiwork has disrupted her life even more. She decides to come clean with him in the hope that he will leave her and go back to Rule. He has a hard time with the witchery and a harder time knowing that she put a spell on him to leave Rule in the first place.

He tells her it's over and stops seeing her. One day Pyewacket shows up at his open office window and Stewart decides to return the cat to her. He is testy with Novak but soon sees a physical change in her that he cannot decipher. When he realizes the cat wants nothing to do with her, he sees that she is no longer a witch because she has fallen in love. Her crying cinches it for him. Love wins.

Rex Harrison and his then-wife Lilli Palmer (how wonderful she would have been) starred in the successful Broadway version of John Van Druten's play. Daniel Taradash adapted the play for the screen.

For a couple of years it had been thought that Grace Kelly and Cary Grant would do it. The public had been clamoring for the pair to share the silver screen again after their successful outing in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. After Kelly left Hollywood, Grant apparently still wanted to do it. But other forces were at work.

Stewart and Novak worked so well together on Vertigo that they began talking of making another film together. Fifty years later she was still saying that he was her favorite leading man and she had hoped they would make several more films together. They were most fortunate that their wish would come true right away.

By and large it was a very happy experience for everyone. It was filmed entirely on the Columbia lot under the direction of Richard Quine. He would make four movies with Novak and was her boyfriend at the time of making this one. He was also the frequent director of Jack Lemmon and Ernie Kovacs films. Novak and Lemmon had already appeared together in Phfft (1954) and would make The Notorious Landlady in 1962. Novak played the lead in 1955's Picnic in the same role that Rule played on the stage.

The one fly in the ointment to all the happiness on the set came as a result of Stewart thinking he was miscast. As it turned out, critics would agree. (I don't. I'm not sure I think he was miscast in any of his films.) He thought he was too old. (He turned 50 during filming while Novak was 25.) And as it turned out, it was his last romantic lead. In the future he was either married (what? marrieds can't be romantic?) or there was no love interest.

He and Novak were ideally matched as comedy leads. He was given most of the comic lines as he gets befuddled with her witchery. To me, Novak always had an other-worldly quality in addition to her astonishing beauty. Who better to play this part?

I'm not sure why Lemmon was in the film because the part was so small... and for a recent Oscar winner, no less. Kovacs' part could have been cut out and more screen time given to Lemmon. I also wish Rule could have had a larger role... a few more snarky scenes with Novak would have brought me much pleasure. Lanchester had one of her better and more visible roles as the dotty aunt. Gingold, though also in few scenes, makes the best of them.

Pyewacket, who figures most prominently in the story, was actually Novak's cat with the same name. While several Siamese were used (as is usually the case in animal films), the scenes where the cat climbs onto Novak's shoulder was her pet.

I know your life wouldn't work as well if I kept from you that I owned a number of Siamese cats in my life... most of which were named Pyewacket.

The movie features beautiful sets (loved her gallery), costumes, colors and a whole lot of style. There's a hypnotic quality of the whole affair, much of which is spoon-fed to us through the images of the blue eyes of the Siamese. It is all perfectly captured by the cameras of the esteemed James Wong Howe.

I always found it to be a delightful little film. It was a smash when it opened. Here's a wacky scene: