WARNING: SPOILERS

The movie begins with Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) sitting bored in her shop, and I quickly found myself bored by the film. Because of that? Is watching a bored person boring? I’m trying to think of a fascinating movie that focuses on a bored person and coming up blank.

“Bell, Book and Candle” seems like a great idea for a film. Kim Novak plays a witch who seduces “Vertigo” pal Jimmy Stewart on the day he'll get married. My local theater, SIFF Egyptian, played it on a recent Sunday as part of its Halloween program. I didn’t know much about it so decided to check it out. “Maybe there’s a reason it’s being resurrected,” I thought. “Maybe there’s something there.”

There isn’t.

Catty
Gillian runs a shop full of African artifacts on the ground floor of a Manhattan apartment building where both her aunt (Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein), and publisher Shepherd Henderson (Stewart) live. She doesn’t have many customers but she doesn’t seem to mind. She just minds the boredom. These are the first lines of the film. It’s Gillian talking to Pyewacket, her Siamese cat: 

What's the matter with me? Why do I feel this way? It’s such a rut. The same old thing day after day. Same old people. I know I’m feeling sorry for myself but it’s true. Why don't you give me something for Christmas, Pye? … What would I like? … I'd like to do something different. I’d like to meet someone different.

She decides that Shepherd is that someone. Coincidentally, her aunt already has a hand in. She shows up at his place uninvited, and after he tells her to leave she casts a spell on his telephone, requiring him to borrow Gillian’s phone to call the phone company.

Stewart’s Shepherd is mostly an innocent in this movie, but you gotta wonder: Did he knock on Gillian’s door because Kim Novak was on the other side? Sly dog.

Plus he keeps showing up. It’s Christmas Eve, and though Shepherd is meeting his bride-to-be, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), Gillian offhandedly mentions a pub she and her fam will be at, and guess what? Shepherd shows up! With Merle! Then it gets catty. In college, Gillian and Merle didn’t like each other, so Gillian cast a spell to make Merle … what was it … frightened? Of thunder and lightning? In the present day, Gillian casts a spell to make Shepherd fall in love with her.

Could anything be more perfectly Hollywood patriarchal than that? Kim Novak having to cast a spell to make a 50-year-old man fall for her? 

It works, of course. He breaks it off with What’s-Her-Name and sets to canoodling with Gillian. Oh, right. She also casts a spell to send a big-name author, Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), to Shepherd, and thank god. Kovacs is a breath of fresh air in this thing. Redlitch is interested in the supernatural but mostly interested in his next drink. At one point they offer him bourbon or whiskey, he downs whatever they give him and asks what it was. Told whiskey, he requests the bourbon. Everything Kovacs does works in a way that the rest of the film does not. Kovacs is off-kilter and perfect.

For his next book, Redlitch is sussing out—coincidence alert!—witches in New York, and guess who helps? Gillian’s bongo-playing warlock brother Nicky (Jack Lemmon). For some reason, he’s willing to give up the ghost, and admit everything, to get a few bucks. Apparently blinking money or gold into existence isn’t a thing for these witches. 

The bongo-playing makes me wonder, though, if the whole witches enclave idea didn't spring from, I don’t know, someone checking out Beatniks or homosexuals or some other in Greenwich Village. Fifties culture was staid and bland but there were subterranean movements that would soon shift everything. Was this movie a bland harbinger of all that?

Admittedly, it most just feels like 1950s floof, and the last half is pretty convoluted. Gillian confesses about the spell, Shep doesn’t believe her. Then he does believe her and breaks up with her, and goes to another witch to have her spell removed, but he can’t convince Merle about the spell so she'll take him back. Meanwhile, Gillian is falling apart, particularly since Pyewacket keeps running away from her. Because she’s no longer a witch. You lose your witchiness, apparently, if you fall in love, which she’s done with Shep, and the proof is when she cries. Witches can’t cry. When Shep realizes this, he takes her in his arms and kisses her. Happy ending.

Unmentioned is the fact that she cries not when Shep leaves her but when Pyewacket does. That’s the true love story.

Broomsticks
Given the talent in the room, the thing’s a slog. It had some success. It got Novak (and Pyewacket) on the cover of Life magazine, and it (along with “I Married a Witch”) inspired the successful 1960s TV sitcom “Bewitched." But it wasn’t the success they thought it would be. It certainly didn’t last—the screening at SIFF notwithstanding.

Apparently Stewart thought he was awkward in the lead, was tired of romancing women half his age, and stopped taking romantic lead roles thereafter. His next, “Anatomy of a Murder,” was actually perfect for him.

The title is a reference to exorcising a witch—“ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle”—but it’s a bad title. I keep wanting to go “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Which, come to think of it, is a better title. For this. Even if we don't see bedknobs.