I rewatched Bell, Book and Candle

They remade the movie or it is a TV show. Kim was at least 30 but Jimmy Stewart looked 50. At least Kim did not look like a child with Jimmy.

They used to put Audrey Hepburn with a lot of older guys...it looked really wrong.

Kim Novak was 26 when she did BB&C, and she looked all grown up. Today's 26 year-olds, like Emma Watson and Kristen Stewart and Jennifer Lawrence still look and act like they're college freshmen.

Wasn't this film the inspiration for "Bewitched"? I thought I read that somewhere.

It was and so was I Married a Witch.

Absolutely love that movie. I always wonder if the gay subtext was apparent at the time.

Kim Novak WAS considered a "twenty something bimbo" at the time of this movie.

What I meant by bimbo was no plastic surgery and a more sophisticated aura and voice.

Maybe Jimmy Stewart looked 50 by '50's standards. By today's standards, he looked 75.

You are not the only ones who thought Stewart was too old. The Hitchcock and Anthony Mann films helped him in the 1950's but between BBAC, (his last starring romantic lead) and the Lindbergh Story, for which he was WAY too old lots of critics - and the box office itself - definitely suffered.

James Stewart and Kim Novak did BBaC the same year they did Vertigo, and that tanked at the box office. Hitchcock blamed its failure on Stewart's age. He felt that nobody wanted to see Stewart as a romantic lead anymore.

Saw the TMC interview with Kim Novak recently. what a beautiful, sensitive woman. She was so hurt after people trashed her appearance after the Academy Awards a few years back. She's in her 80s now, but still a class act.

R11 that was our kind President who made the worst comments that really hurt Kim..btw Don you aren’t any great prize either.

I really don’t like Jimmy Stewart - he ruins a movie for me. He was perfect for Its a Wonderful Life - but I feel like that personality doesn’t work in any other movie. That voice grates.

This movie was weird. Was it supposed to be edgy for the time? I though it would be very Village in the 50s but was disappointed.

I think that the movie was trying to create a Greenwich Village that only partially existed. There are several movies, like My Sister Eileen, that try to create a hip Greenwich Village, everyone walking around wearing berets. The West Village was largely Italian up through the late 60s. Yes, there were a few clubs and beatniks that hung around them, but very few movies recognize the largely Italian Catholic population.

Pyewacket ❤️

I always thought Faye Dunaway sounded like Kim Novak, especially in "Chinatown", where her voice is a ringer for Kim's in the Madeleine portion of "Vertigo".

You might also like this one, which is witchcraft in the Village. It is strange for a war-time movie to have such a really downer ending. It also was supposedly the inspiration for the shower scene in Psycho. Silent film star Evelyn Brent makes a brief appearance as a one-armed cultist.

From Wikipedia:

The Seventh Victim is a 1943 American horror film noir directed by Mark Robson and starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, Kim Hunter, and Hugh Beaumont. Written by DeWitt Bodeen and Charles O'Neal, and produced by Val Lewton for RKO Radio Pictures, the film focuses on a young woman who stumbles on an underground cult of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village, New York City, while searching for her missing sister. It marks Robson's directorial debut and was Hunter's first onscreen role.

And of course, if a candidate in the 50s had said something like trump did about Kim, he would have been out of the running. Not everything has gotten better.

R17, that's a great film, as were all the Lewton-produced horror films at RKO. Little poems of terror. I think the lanky actor who plays the poet in that died soon after in wartime combat.

I don't understand who got their hands on Kim Novak's eyebrows in this and VERTIGO...or why they hated her so much.

It's like they're painted on.

The 50s were the makeup nadir.

It was a fifties look- the thicker eyebrows thing.. Guessing it was a reaction to the over-plucked/erased eyebrows of the thirties which ended up just being like a pencilled line - which look even more ugly and artificial.

OP, Janice Rule, though playing a bitch, also had a beautiful voice. She was married to Ben Gazzara, at the height of his hotness. She eventually became a psychotherapist!

Finally saw Bell, Book and Candle, which looks amazing, but, wow, Jimmy Stewart was definitely old enough to play Novak's father. But I love the rest of the cast, even though Kim was a limited actress.

So, who should have played Stewart's role. Cary Grant aged better, but he was also getting on in years by that time.

R23, Cary Grant actually wanted the part and would have gotten it, with Grace Kelly in Novak's role and Alexander Mackendrick directing. But Kelly went off to get married, and Mackendrick and Grant had a falling out with Paramount Studios.

Grant would've been perfect. Yes, he was much older than Novak, but in 1958 he still had IT. When we first see Stewart through the shop window and realize that Gillian has had her eyes on him for some time, you wonder, WHY?? He was old and pasty and, having never met him, she wouldn't have known his personality or character. Had it been Grant at the window, we would've instantly understood.

If not Grant, then perhaps a younger, handsome leading man like Rock Hudson or Bill Holden. Even the wooden John Gavin would've been more believable than Stewart.

This might have been a great movie with a different male lead. One who could conceivably attract two beautiful women in their twenties, one with some sex appeal and a flirty-naughty twinkle in his eye, one who understood the subtext, or who had a clue that there WAS a subtext! Cary Grant could have made it work despite his age, and I'm no fan of Rock Hudson, but he could do light material and might have been very good. Certainly better than Stewart.

Look, I'll defend Stewart as a romantic lead in "Vertigo" until the day I die, his age works for the story of a man who goes batshit crazy when he meets a hot young woman. But Stewart is all wrong for "BB&C", his looks and his sense of humor just don't fit the material.

[quote]Kim Novak was 26 when she did BB&C, and she looked all grown up

Actually, filming of BB&C started Feb 3, 1958, and Novak turned 25 ten days later.

BB&C is such a soothing movie to me. The music, her shop, the overall design...love it. And Ernie Kovacs, god rest him. Nothing better.

Grant would have worked, I guess, since he did stay dashing. Rex Harrison played it on stage, but he was definitely a little craggy for it by the time the film was made. Can't quite see Rock Hudson doing it.

That said, wouldn't have cared for Grace Kelly in the role. Part of what makes BBC work is that Novak has a sensual bohemian vibe. I know Grace Kelly got around in real life, but I don't see her as a convincing barefoot high-fashion beatnik. Kelly, onscreen, always had that finishing-school girl quality--maybe naughty finishing-school girl, but finishing school, nonetheless.

So did the film makers intentionally make Novak's transition to frau super cheesy with her gallery going from interesting African to cheesy shell sculptures? Or were shell sculptures seen as edgy?

I'm surprised Janice didn't bitch slap Kim, r22.....

I was always fascinated by how Novak's character went from selling African antiquities to art made from seashells. What was that all about?

Not just seashells, seashell gardens and flowers. She went from wild to tamed. All ready to be little Suzy Homemaker.

Nowadays, the public and studios prefer actors and actresses with adolosecent /child-like appearances. Americans are extremely neurotic about mature looks. I've lost count of how many times I see comments shrieking about how "awful" or "hard" some actor/actress/public figure looks if they don't have the face of a 19 year old. There's this weird expectation that a 35 year old should still look about fifteen years younger. Europeans seem to be less obssessed with looking 18 until 40.