Autumnsong: 25 Days of Christmas | Bell Book and Candle, 1958

Bell Book and Candle | 1958

This DVD poster is a bit cooler than the
original poster, probably because of Jimmy's
'she's a witch' face

It’s the Christmas season and Gilian Holroyd is all by hersekf in her peculiar shop at the ground level of an apartment building at Greenwitch Village in New York City. Around her are statues, masks and other objects that represent african and oceanic arts. An unusual shop, one might say, if it wasn’t for the fact that the owner was ever more unusual herself. The young woman is a modern witch.

The holidays have a way of bringing up a certain awareness of our own solutitude and smallness in the world, and that’s exactly the type of Christmas blues Gillian is feeling when she’s alone in her shop, watching her neighbor walk by the window to make his way to his apartment upstairs.

“Oh, Pye, Pye, Pyewacket. What's the matter with me? Why do I feel this way? It's such a rut. The same old thing day after day. The same old people. Oh, I know I'm feeling sorry for myself, but it's true. Why don't you give me something for Christmas, Pye? Hmm, what would I like? I'd like to do something different. I'd like to meet someone different. Look, there's that man upstairs. He's different. Why don't I ever know people like that? Hmm? Why don't you give me him for Christmas, Pye?”

Love for a whitch is a complicated thing… It is said that a witch who falls in love loses her powers… But one can hardly blaime the girl for wanting her neighbor for Christmas, seeing as her neighbor is Jimmy Stewart. He plays Shep Henderson, a publisher who recently moved to the building. An unfortunate phone malfunction throws them together when he needs to borrow her phone to call maintenance for repairs and she becomes truly interested in the man. He aunt and brother think she should use a spell or something to hook Shep, but Gillian resists that idea… She wants to catch this guy the honest way…

All of that changes when she discovers he is to marry a hateful former classmate of her the very next day. Gillian throws caution through the window and uses magic to stop the wedding and get together with Shep for the first time. After that, the plot thickens and their lives becomes a series of spells, deceptions and confessions which will not untangle until the very last scene.

A lot of Bell Book and Candle is about Gillian’s struggle with her wish to be something different and the difficulties of not having enough information to make a choice or take action… Most of all, a single question stays in Gillian’s mind: does Shep love her because she charmed him or was there anything genuine in his feelings? Whatever it is, is it worth giving up her powers for? Is it up to her?

“Don’t you ever wish that we weren’t—what we are?That you could just spend Christmas Eve in a little church somewhere listening to carols instead of bongo drums? I wish I could just spend some time with everyday people for a change.”

Their christmas eve spent at the unusual witch club, Zodiac is certainly different from most Christmas eves we see in film.

Gillian tries and refrain from using magic, but she can’t escape her own nature and the mistakes made by her foolish brother Nick (Jack Lemmon) mean that she often sees herself forced to use her powers to put out some fire. For the most part, the story features Gillian attempting to lower herself to Shep’s level, to be a simple human woman, and that’s a bit refreshing considering we are saturated of stories in which it is the human character that wants to ‘raise above his condition’ and become whatever supernatural being he or she happens to have fallen for.

As for Shep, as far as the balance between suspecting something is afoot/ discovering the existence of magic/believing in magic goes, Shep’s responses to the absurdities he comes across are perfectly believable. The acting is just great. The character is pretty interesting and from the very begining it's clear that much like she's unusual in being a witch he is pretty unusual too, for a human... And even before she begins casting spells he is drawn to her mysterious primitive art shop and curious about what Christmas Eve would be like in that alternative Zodiac club

The movie was considered a blockbuster in its time and opened on Christmas Day in 1958 (which is pretty great, releasing a film about witchcraft on a religious holiday). It inspired a popular TV series called Bewitched which went on air several years later.

In addition to the theme of Gillian experiencing the strangeness of being an outsider and paying the price for being different (a plot that is only possible because of the Christmas setting, which highlights all the ‘ordinary activities’ she can’t be a part of), there are many interesting parallels drawn between magic and romantic relationships . The spell to break a love spell, for instance, requires that one should confront the other person (like any break up does). There’s even the suggestion that love might be a type of magic by itself (which could be right, for all we know, since, several years later, Dumbledore would claim love to be the most powerful magic of all).