The Cast, the Color, and the Music

I don't know if I would have much liked Bell Book and Candle had I been around to see it in 1958 and taken it as a new release.

But as a NOSTALGIC release today, decades later, it is kind of a charmer.

The cast is very strong, even if the lead was rather miscast.

That would be James Stewart, matched again(in a stroke of cinematic serendipity) with Kim Novak in the very same year(1958) as their now monumental classic ("Vertigo.") Back then, Vertigo evidently wasn't seen to be the greatest movie ever made; it was rather a downer for Jimmy and Kim. Its May release was followed at the end of the year, at Xmas, with this much happier concoction.

But if Stewart seemed SOMEWHAT too old for Novak in Vertigo, he seemed WAY too old for Novak in BB and C. It was probably a difference in role for Stewart. His Vertigo cop, Scottie Ferguson , could be played as an older man looking at a last chance for idealized love with a younger woman. His BB and C publisher, Shep Shepard, is really a Cary Grant part: meant to be suave, sophisticated and a ladies man, Stewart's bean pole figure and whiny drawl comes across as a country bumpkin inexplicably attired in city boy threads.

And too old for Novak -- who looks gorgeous in BB and C in a way that Hitchcock would not allow in Vertigo. In Vertigo, Kim was dressed in a matronly gray suit dress, among other constrictive outfits. In BB and C(working for her lover at the time, Richard Quine), she's dressed and coiffed HER way and -- va va voom!)

Columbia Chief Harry Cohn put contractee Jack Lemmon into service here for pretty much the last time as a mere supporting player -- in four more years LEMMON would be the more age-appropriate love interest to Kim Novak in Richard Quine's The Notorious Landlady.

Another Columbia contractee -- Ernie Kovacs -- steals the show as far as I'm concerned. Kovacs had made his name in daytime and nighttime TV as a rather arty TV comedy surrealist; but he had great "comedy character guy looks" and Columbia snapped him up for movies. He was paired a few times with Lemmon...it has been said that Lemmon and Kovacs were the team that Lemmon and Matthau became -- Kovacs died young in a 1962 car crash.

Kovacs is contrasted to the neat-as-a-pin Stewart: rumpled suit, tie askew, overlong floppy hair all over his head, and a trademark big moustache. But best of all, a befuddled, dreamy persona as the best-selling author of books about witchcraft who says to Stewart on first meeting: "I'm Sidney Redlitch and I'm supposed to meet you?" -- not knowing why(a spell from witch Kim Novak brought him to Stewart, that's why.)

Two delightful females in further support: daft and twee Elsa Lanchester as a junior grade witch, and overripe gargoyle Hermoine Gingold as the Head Boss Witch.

Somehow being surrounded by this august company saves James Stewart from looking entirely ridiculous in his miscast lover man sophisticate role. But it was really the last time he would play such a romantic lead. Married men, Westerners and loners from here on out...even his courting of Vera Miles in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance seems homespun and sexless.

Lemmon looks wasted in his small part, but sells it with that goofy Lemmon charm(he didn't have a great voice, but he had great DELIVERY.)

And Novak? Gorgeous. Enchanting. Arousing.

If only she had had Cary or Rock or Bill Holden as her co-star.

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James Wong Howe's cinematography is a rush of rich color -- emphasis on blues(as in the blue titles) and greens(as in the green lighting on the witches' faces when casting spells) and wintry white(this is a Christmas-time winter movie.) George Duning's score is that kind of lush, lightly jazzy, highly emotional stuff that often makes a trip to the late fifties a killer emotional rush.

These matters of cast(most of them long gone now), color and music always make Bell Book and Candle a movie I'm very comfortable to visit, even as its plot is rather slight and a confrontation with the darker parts of the tale(its Stewart and Kovacs versus a coven of WITCHES, for God's sake) is thrown away. (Well, that's part of the moral of the tale: these witches and warlocks with their "secret nightclub" are coded 1958 gays being assimilated into the larger society. Yep, I've read that.)