by Douglas Messerli
Daniel
Taradash (writer, based on the play by John Van Druten), Richard Quine
(director) Bell, Book and Candle /
1958
The same year that James Stewart and Kim Novak
starred together so brilliantly in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the two were paired up again in the film version of the
hit play by John Van Druten, Bell, Book
and Candle. The director, Richard Quine clearly is not one of the most
brilliant auteurs of film history,
but he is often a good craftsman, and along with his sometimes collaborator
Blake Edwards, had a good sense of music and comedic timing, himself having
worked as a musical performer in films.
His
1958 film, however, with several of actors with whom he worked many times,
including Novak—with who he was having an affair—Jack Lemmon, and Ernie Kovacs,
is well worth viewing again; for, although the somewhat silly plot involves
witches and magic—with wonderful character actors such as Elsa Lanchester and
Hermione Gingold cackling up a storm of good laughs—there is something darker
in this work, and some of its images, captured by the brilliant
cinematographer, James Wong Howe, pulls this film in directions away from a
witch-crafting spoof in the manner of the earlier I Married a Witch and the later television serial, Bewitched.

But
these might almost be seen as metaphors for what one might describe as a
shadowy group of "fellow travelers"—if nothing else "beatnik
outsiders" (Nicky plays the bongos, Gillian goes barefoot)—who do not
strictly fit into the normative America Shep inhabits. His vision of the US,
replete with his painterly soon-to-be wife, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), who
in imitation of the cubists and surrealists paints muddled images throughout,
is a righteous, self-serving social world which is determined to inhabit. At
least, the straight and far too serious Shep is willing to try out the new nightclub
he has heard about from the Holroyd's, whereas Merle complains of its "scrabbyness"
and discovers therein, to her horror, Gillian, whom she had known in college.
We soon discover that Merle was just as singular-minded then as now, reporting
to authorities Gillian's shoeless jubilation and getting her expelled. In
revenge, Gillian arranged for a whole season of lightning storms,
replete with thunder in order to terrify the thunder-fearing tattletale. And she
now arranges, in her territory, for Nicky and his music making friends to ring
out the night with a rousing version of "Stormy Weather" which speeds
off Merle into the Christmas Eve cold.
Returning home, Shep discovers Gillian and her outsider family busy
summoning up the author Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), and she, employing Pyewacket,
sets out to seduce Shep. It is an easy task, given her facial beauty and her
backless gown. By morning the couple have been swept away in love, usually
defined as a kind a magic, as they look down upon a New York square from the
Flatiron building, reminding us of photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn's
"The Octopus."

Gillian, so Shep now discovers, can even blush (she is now able to be embarrassed
by what had previously no effect upon her) and even cries, vulnerable clearly
to the vagaries of not only love but everyday American culture! So can the two
now come together, denying all the "magic" that they previously
embraced, but ready to live out a more ordinary romance.
At
film's end, only the loud purr of the cat suggests that there may be something
more in store—if nothing else, the occasional memory of Gillian's powerfully "dark"
family roots and her outsider involvements.
Los
Angeles, July 17, 2012
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