As a more under the radar “Christmas movie,” Bell, Book and Candle serves to stress the point that every rom-com before and since has wanted to get across (somewhat less literally): love is magic. Or, at least, the inexplicable voodoo surrounding how it happens can feel that way. For Greenwich Village witch Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak), it isn’t so much that way for her as it is for the object of her affection: mere mortal and editor at a publishing house, Shep Henderson (James Stewart, fresh from another appearance with Novak earlier that year in Vertigo).
As her upstairs neighbor to the shop she works at (and lives in), specializing in rare African art, Gillian is able to watch how blissfully ordinary Shep’s life is from afar while she herself must endure the night-to-night dullness of engaging in the expected witchly activity of going to The Zodiac, a nightclub where her warlock brother, Nicky (Jack Lemmon), plays the tom-tom drums–much to his dismay. Her aunt, Queenie (Elsa Lanchester), can see and sense Gillian’s overall dissatisfaction and ennui with life, deciding to use a little bit of her own powers for some matchmaking good as she hexes Shep’s phone with nothing but garbled voices so that he’s forced to go downstairs and use Gillian’s, striking up a loose rapport with her. Further convinced that he’s just the boring man to make her own boringly exciting life a little more interesting, Queenie later invites him to join her with Gillian at The Zodiac for Christmas Eve, despite the latter cautioning him that “it’s kind of a dive…but it’s fun.”
Intrigued and, of course, bewitched before any spells come into play, Shep decides to take them up on their offer, unfortunately bringing along with him his girlfriend, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule). Vexed by her presence not just for the fact that it proves Shep is taken, Gillian immediately points out that the two went to Wellesley together–though Merle feigns she has no memory of it, until calling out Gillian for being the girl that used to go to class barefoot. “They put you on probation for it, didn’t they?” Gillian accusingly returns, “Somebody wrote a note to the dean about it.” That Merle was always a narc and a “beau-snatcher.” Thus, Queenie reasons, “Well, isn’t that nice? Now you can’t have a single twitch about taking him away from her.” But Gillian counters, “No, I don’t want him that way.”
To her, there would be something dishonest about it. And, unlike her successor in love witchery, Elaine (Samantha Robinson), in, what else, The Love Witch, she has some hesitancy about using her powers for this purpose. That is, until Shep shows up to her shop/apartment after catching her, Queenie and Nicky gathered around a green flame. Thinking the place might go into a blaze, he investigates, only to be given a moment alone with Gillian long enough to tell her that he’s getting married tomorrow “or today” as it’s already midnight by this point. And, in the spirit of after-midnight activities, Gillian finally decides to surrender to her Satan-given gift and make shit happen.
Accordingly, her familiar, Pyewacket, helps her to cast a spell on Shep with the mere use of piercing blue feline eyes and an eerie song hummed. Soon, the hours pass like seconds as Shep finds himself on top of the Flatiron building with Gillian, all at once aware he should probably tell his erstwhile fiancée that it’s not happening, this marriage thing.
As time wears on and Gillian finds herself falling under a different kind of spell–that of the scientifically unclassifiable love–she discovers she isn’t aware it’s really happening until Shep suggests they get married, setting off a revelation within her as she explains, “I just don’t think I’m cut out for marriage, that’s all. Because of the way that I’ve lived: selfishly and restlessly, one thing after another… I don’t mean affairs. It’s just that…it’s just that my life has been sort of, well, disreputable. At least, seen through your eyes. I’m cynical, and I’m jealous and I’m vindictive.” Shep insists, “I don’t believe that.” But Gillian knows, “Well, it’s true.”
Nonetheless, love–not just witchcraft but mortal sorcery–has its way with her as she consents to give up the life of freedom she may have balked at in the beginning but that has served her so well. So it is that she decides she must confess the truth to Shep, hoping that he’ll still love her even once the spell is broken. As she tries to get him to see the truth, he asks (and remember, this is still at the height of McCarthyism), “You been engaging in un-American activities or something?” She quips, “No, I’d say very American. Early American.”
Of course, the fact that love is painted as some sort of witchery performed on the part of women to coax otherwise reasonable men into marriage is also telling of the epoch. Then again, warlocks posing as humans are just as guilty of ensnaring women into the trap of recognizing love through the government.
In any case, only when Breakfast at Tiffany’s came along soon after in 1961 did a cat hold so much weight between securing a relationship between two people.
