Bell, Book and Candle

Bell, Book and Candle (1958) is a Hollywood romantic fantasy comedy directed by Richard Quine — watch it online on iFILM. Kim Novak stars as Gillian Holroyd, a very real witch running an ethnic art gallery in New York, with James Stewart as the unsuspecting publisher who moves in upstairs — the same on-screen pair from Hitchcock's Vertigo that same year.

Gillian casts a love spell on Shep more or less on a whim, and it works. The trouble is that something shifts along the way, and genuine feeling turns out to be incompatible with magic. Jack Lemmon brings sharp comic energy as her bongo-playing warlock brother, while Ernie Kovacs plays a credulous author researching witchcraft who keeps wandering into the middle of everything. The film wears its 1950s charm lightly — part screwball comedy, part odd romance about what you lose when you stop pretending. Stream Bell, Book and Candle (1958) online on iFILM.