Bell, Book and Candle (1958)
Comedy | Romance | Fantasy

"A whimsical comedy with hilarity and romance in equal portions." - Variety

Meet Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak), Greenwich Village's most seductive sorceress. Powerful, glamrous, and a wee bit bored, Gillian knows that witches can't fall in love. But they can have fun...especially if their lover belongs to another woman! So when Gillian discovers handsome new neighbor Shep Henderson (James Stewart) is the fiancé of an old college nemesis (Janice Rule), she promptly puts the befuddled publisher under her spell. But while her sex may have heated up Shep's heart, it has also unthawed her own, leading to a romantic compilation that not even Pyewacket -- Gillian's mind-reading cat -- could have foreseen.

User Comment: Robert Boyce (robert48@optonline.net) from United States, 18 October 2005 o I researched this film a little and discovered a web site that claims it was actually an inside joke about the Post WWII Greenwich Village world of gays and lesbians. With the exception of Stewart and Novak, the warlocks and witches represented that alternative lifestyle. John Van Druten who wrote the stage play was apparently gay and very familiar with this Greenwich Village. I thought this was ironic because I first saw Bell, Book and Candle in the theater when I was in 5th or 6th grade just because my parents took me. It was hard to get me to a movie that didn't include horses, machine guns, or alien monsters and I planned on being bored. But, I remember the moment when Jimmy Stewart embraced Kim Novak on the top of the Flatiron building and flung his hat away while the camera followed it fluttering to the ground. As the glorious George Duning love theme soared, I suddenly got a sense of what it felt like to fall in love. The first stirrings of romantic/sexual love left me dazed as I left the theater. I am sure I'm not the only pre-adolescent boy who was seduced by Kim Novak's startling, direct gaze. It's ironic that a gay parable was able to jump-start heterosexual puberty in so many of us. I am in my late 50's now and re-watched the film yesterday evening and those same feelings stirred as I watched that hat touch down fifty years later . .

Summary: Puberty Catalyst.

[CSW] -3- Having known for a long time that the term Bell, Book and Candle was a reference to witchcraft and that there was a famous romantic comedy movie of the same name, I had never seen it. I found it to be a delightful comedy as I have found every Jimmy Stewart comedy to be. Kim Novak's eyebrows put me off a little but I suppose it was to give her a more sinister look. I think I expected The Bell, The Book and The Candle to have had a more important part in the plot than just a line for exorcising witches but just why would I expect that in a light romantic comedy is beyond even me, perhaps I too was hexed. So I rang the bell closed the book and extinguished the candle and now I feel better.

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