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 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 necessary in the
sex-oriented films he directed and produced.
His 1958 film, however, with several of
actors with whom he worked many times, including Novak—with whom 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 work
in directions away from a witch-crafting spoof in the manner of the earlier I Married a Witch and the later
television serial, Bewitched.
I should
perhaps interrupt in my discussion of this movie to alert the reader that “the witch”
throughout film and literary history was generally also associated with lesbian
behavior, and the witch’s coven, her criminal associates, had long been
established as a lesbian community, made clear in later films such as Ulrike
Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons (1972) and other later works.
Publisher Shep Henderson (James Stewart)
lives in an apartment surrounded by a family of witches and warlocks—Gillian
Holroyd (Kim Novak), who also runs a traditional African sculpture gallery,
warlock Nicky Holroyd (Jack Lemmon), a young man of adolescent behavior who
uses his powers to switch off streetlights and improve his luck with love, and
a daffy aunt, Queenie Holroyd (Elsa Lanchester) who ineffectually snoops on
their new neighbor, Henderson, scrambling his phone system when he complains of
finding her in his locked apartment room. And there are also a whole room of
others who bring to life the local bar, the Zodiac, including the gifted Bianca
de Passe (Hermione Gingold), and a French singer who might well remind one of
Charles Aznavour.
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 surrealist painter images throughout, seeks a righteous,
self-serving social world which she 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
Holroyds, 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 to get her expelled. In revenge,
Gillian arranged for a whole season of lightning storms in order to terrify the
thunder-fearing tattletale. And she now arranges, in her own 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
ice.
I have enjoyed
watching this lovely movie for years, and only just recently realized that the
strange underground club which Shep suddenly stumbles upon, the Zodiac is a lot
like the “underground” gay bars of New York City in the same period.
When I recalled
that original playwright, John van Druten, was gay, it made perfect sense that
the strange “underground” into which Shep had fallen was in fact an entire gay
world into which he was suddenly swept up, a world of secret codes and private
messages, of powers of love beyond his heterosexual imagination.
Of course, his
was still a heterosexual infatuation, but his sudden realization that it was
nothing at all like his previous relationships and that it might have been
caused by, god forbid, a kind of “spell” closer to witchcraft than a normal
heterosexual attraction between a man and woman, suddenly infuses this film
with an entirely different message than what it pretends.
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, an emotional response often
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."
Redlitch,
meanwhile, takes up in a close friendship with Gillian’s brother Nicky, who
joyfully takes him on a tour of the secret warlock world—read closeted gay-oriented
world—which he inhabits, allowing the would-be literary sensationalist all the
material he might have sought to reveal the underworld of witchcraft / gay
life. If there isn’t much “power” to it—the most Nicky can do is turn off street
lights and turn up the radios of straight couples who happen to be necking in
his territory—but the warlock makes the most of his secret knowledge and urban
powers he can to capture the stranger’s interest.
Shep,
meanwhile, coming to terms with the fact that he has been seduced by a witch/lesbian
who supposedly cannot truly fall in love with men, must ultimately cleanse his
bodily system, with the help of Mrs. de Passe, to free him from the infection!
Gillian, on her
part, loses her "powers," presumably giving up the sexual and
political eccentricities her life symbolizes. She transforms her native African
art shop, a truly political statement in the New York landscape, into a calmer
repository of pretty shells.
Gillian, so Shep
now discovers, can even blush—she is now able to be embarrassed by what had
previously no effect upon her, as any proper virgin might be—and even cries as
all “normal” females do, being vulnerable clearly to the vagaries of not only
love but of everyday American culture! So can the two now come together,
denying all the "magic" that they previously embraced, but ready to
live out a far 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—long before the
real-life Minnesota housewife, former terrorist Sara Jane Olson, revealed her
previous life as a far-left activist who was a member of the Symbionese
Liberation Army.
No wonder
Novak—who in many of her roles seems to be plotting on how of get out of the
skin of the very characters she's been hired to depict—seems more than a little
anxious in the slightly clumsy embracement of Stewart's arms. In Vertigo of the same year, one should recall, she twice jumped to her
death.
Los Angeles,
July 17, 2012
Reprinted from International
Cinema Review (July 2012).
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