This month’s Classic Movies and Late Night oddities line-up at The Prytania has been, without question, the best run of repertory programming I’ve ever seen in New Orleans.  Even with the caveat that I came of age during the AMC Palaces’ total decimation of the city’s indie cinema scene, the wealth of classic horror titles on their October docket feels like an all-time great moment in local theatrical exhibition: Psycho, The Shining, The Craft, The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now, Scream, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th, Dracula’s Daughter, Beetlejuice, The Black Cat, The Exorcist, The Creeping Flesh, Theatre of Blood, Little Shop of Horrors, and their regular midnight reruns of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  It’s such a staggering assemblage that I had to be choosy about which screenings to make time for, especially since The Broad was screening some of my favorite oddball horror sequels on the other side of town: Halloween III, A Nightmare on Elm Street III, and Friday the 13th Part VIII, all choice selections.  What a time to be unalive! Maybe it’s a little silly, then, that I treated The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Bell, Book and Candle as high-priority, can’t-miss viewing while I skipped out on a few screenings of classics I already know & love.  Bell, Book and Candle is a fluffy major-studio romcom about a lovelorn witch, establishing the 1950s middle ground between its 40s equivalent I Married a Witch and its 60s equivalent Bewitched.  It’s not an electrifying watch, but it is a cozy one, providing the same witchy-but-not-scary seasonal viewing most modern audiences find in Hocus Pocus instead.  While it feels a little puny in comparison to some of the all-time classics it shared a marquee with this month, its exhibition was more of a special occasion in some ways, since it has weirdly spotty home-video distribution right now, available only on Tubi or on DVD through the New Orleans Public Library.  More importantly, it fit in nicely with the usual programming of The Prytania’s Classic Movies slot, due to its unlikely connection to Alfred Hitchcock.

Part of the reason this month’s classic horror line-up at The Prytania feels so refreshingly adventurous is because the single-screen landmark usually only has the space in their schedule for a couple well-worn, widely beloved classics – more TCM (Turner Classic Movies) than TCM (Texas Chainsaw Massacre).  It’s still the most dependable repertory venue in the city, though, and over the years I’ve come to associate it with Hitchcock’s catalog in particular, since the director seemed to be a personal favorite of late proprietor Rene Brunet, Jr.  I’ve seen a good handful of Hitchcock titles for the very first time by attending The Prytania on Sunday mornings: To Catch a Thief, Strangers on a Train, Saboteur, Rope, Suspicion, Stage Fright, and Frenzy, to name them all.  Unfortunately, Hitchcock did not direct his own witchy love-spell romcom for The Prytania to program this month (they opted for Psycho instead), but Bell, Book and Candle does share some incidental similarities to his most critically lauded work.  It’s essentially the cutesy, witchy B-side to Vertigo. Both films feature Kim Novak putting Jimmy Stewart under a spell while his jilted, more socially appropriate love interest works out her romantic frustration by furiously painting on canvas alone in her apartment.  Novak’s given more to do here than play Stewart’s object of desire, since she initially holds all the (magical) power in their relationship and the vulnerability of their romance puts her in danger instead of him.  In either case, she is treated as a kind of fetish object by the camera. Here, she’s so performatively feminine that she’s basically feline, as indicated by the onscreen credit for the costumer who provided her furs.  There’s also an intense, Tarantino-esque focus on her bare feet, which is presented as a witchy character quirk but becomes outrageously obsessive by the time we linger on them slipping in & out of high heels.  The difference is that in Bell, Book and Candle she’s an aspirational figure for a lovelorn audience, while in Vertigo she’s a collectible figurine for an obsessive Stewart (and his directorial counterpart).

Novak plays Gillian Holroyd—a powerful young witch making waves on the Manhattan occult scene—whose loneliness & boredom at the top fixates her on the unsuspecting, nonmagical book publisher Shepherd Henderson, played by Stewart.  She’s careful to only share her powers with those she trusts: a bumbling hipster brother who’s smoked one too many jazz cigarettes (Jack Lemon, auditioning for his career-making part in Some Like It Hot), a kooky upstairs aunt (Elsa “Bride of Frankenstein” Lanchester), and the fellow witches & warlocks who drown martinis and talk shop at the magical dive bar The Zodiac Club.  Falling for her new neighbor and enchanting him to ditch his uptight fiancée is what unravels her usually careful approach to witchcraft, both because he’s a publisher who’s threatening to expose her coven with an upcoming book titled Magic in Manhattan and because falling in love means that she’ll lose her magical powers, according to The Rules.  Outside a couple scenes in which Novak and her witchy family (including the actress’s real-life pet Siamese cat) cast spells in her lavish apartment, there isn’t much genuine horror imagery in Bell, Book and Candle.  It’s just as much a precursor to Sex and the City as it is a precursor to Bewitched, with most of the central drama resulting from the witch’s disastrous, Carrie Bradshaw style attempts to “have it all” while living in The Big City.  It’s all very light, cozy, and unrushed, with only a couple jokes about the coven’s “Un-American activities” and what possible insults “witch” might rhyme with registering as anything especially risqué.  Still, it was wonderful to see on the big screen for the first time with a giggling crowd, and it was a wonderful middle ground between this month’s run of classic-horror obscurities at The Prytania and their Classic Movies series’ usual TCM-friendly fare.

While I’m fixating on Bell, Book and Candle‘s appropriateness as seasonal programming, I do want to note that it resonated with me as more of a Christmas movie than a Halloween one, despite all of its thematic & aesthetic focus on witchcraft.  Much of the early stretch of the film is set during Christmas rituals, including a Christmas Eve get-together at The Zodiac Club and Novak trading presents with her family around a modernist “tree” sculpture.  Halloween and Christmas both have cultural significance as liminal stretches of the calendar when the veil between worlds is at its thinnest, so it makes just as much sense to me that this story about a young witch in love would be set during Yule as it would during Samhain.  It also makes sense to me that its Christmastime setting would be forgotten when choosing seasonal programming, especially as memories of the film get muddled with its better-remembered predecessor I Married a Witch.  Speaking personally, I’m grateful that I got to catch Bell, Book and Candle on the big screen for my first viewing, but I am mentally filing it away as a Christmas movie for future revisits.  As a life-long Scrooge, I’m always desperate for lightly spooky Yuletide movies that aren’t so saccharine they rot your teeth, while witchy Halloween movies are already more than plentiful. 

-Brandon Ledet