I was raised in a household where witchcraft was an absolute no-no. Any form of magic was frowned on. I can understand this – it’s natural for parents to want to protect their children from anything that smacks of the Occult. But there are some forms of magic I think are just fun, and “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” is one of them.
Angela Lansbury stars as Eglantine Price, a single woman who lives in a secluded house. This separation from the rest of the English village of Pepperinge Eye is perfect for her purposes – you see, she’s taking a correspondence course in how to be a witch.
The setting for this movie is the early years of World War II, and she is convinced that if she can perfect her witchery skills, she can help bring the war to an end.
But a wrench gets thrown in her plans when she’s asked to take in three children from London, sent to the country to escape the bombings. She doesn’t want to help out; houseguests will only slow down her studies, but the children have nowhere else to go. She agrees to help out, but only until more suitable arrangements can be made.
It only goes to further complicate things when her very first broom arrives in the mail that day. She can’t wait to try it out, and after tucking the children in, goes for her first spin. The children see her, and Charlie, the oldest boy and a bit of a con artist, tries to blackmail her to withhold the information, but she turns him into a rabbit instead. (We’ll ignore the fact that she was trying to turn him into a toad – a rabbit is still pretty cool.)
But then word comes that her course has been cancelled, and she needs the last spell in order to end the war. She puts a traveling spell on a bedknob belonging to the upstairs bed, and she and the children clamber on. Her professor (David Tomlinson) lives in London, and so to London they go, only to find out that her professor is a fake. He’s been running the correspondence school as a means to make money, and never actually intended the spells to work. Miss Price must be a rare talent indeed if she’s been able to perform magic with them.
Somewhat disheartened, but not ready to give up on finding a spell that can end the war, Miss Price embarks on a quest to find a spell that will work. The professor and the children come with her, and they visit lands of enchantment and animation, my favorite of which being the dance on the bottom of “The Beautiful Briny Sea.”
I did find that the movie took a while to get going. My kids were bored after a couple of minutes, and so was I. But after we got the plot going, the interest levels rose and we all enjoyed the show together.
This movie is rated G.
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The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe