Bedknobs and Broomsticks

An apprentice witch, 3 kids and a cynical conman search for the missing component to a magic spell useful to the defence of Britain.

• Director: Robert Stevenson
• Genre:Adventure / Comedy / Family / Fantasy / Musical / War
• Runtime:134 minutes

Cast

Angela Lansbury : Miss Price David Tomlinson : EmeliusRoddy McDowall : Mr. Jelk Sam Jaffe : Bookman John Ericson : Col. Heller

In this musical, an apprentice witch, three Cockney war evacuees, and an illusionist conman travel on a magic bed across war-torn England and beyond, encountering various inhabitants of London, football-playing cartoon animals, and Nazi invaders.

In 1940, with the young men away at World War II, Dorset’s only defence is the elderly Home Guard. Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) is a spinster taking a witchcraft correspondence course in the hope of somehow helping the war effort. She is serious, practical and firm. To her annoyance, she is assigned the care of three young siblings evacuated from the London Blitz bombings (she tries to refuse, but due to a government order, she is forced to take the children in). The three, Charlie (Ian Weighill), Carrie (Cindy O’Callaghan) and Paul Rawlins (Roy Snart), discover her witchcraft and Charlie blackmails her. In exchange for their silence, Miss Price casts a spell on a bedknob which Paul pulled off Miss Price’s late father’s brass bed. The bed can now travel anywhere that Paul tells it.

Miss Price, searching for the substitutiary locomotion spell which makes inanimate objects move of their own accord, uses the flying bed to travel with the children to London in search of Professor Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson), the putative headmaster of the Emilius Brown Correspondence College of Witchcraft. He is revealed as a conman who inadvertently used spells from a book of a real magician, Astoroth. Mr. Browne takes them to “his” town house, which is actually someone else’s mansion in an abandoned part of bombed-out London, from whose nursery Paul takes a children’s picture book about the Lost Isle of Naboombu.

In possession of half of Astoroth’s spellbook, the group travels to Portobello Road’s marketplace to seek the other half, where an extensive multicultural dance sequence takes place. A spiv (petty criminal) named Swinburne (Bruce Forsyth) overhears them looking through bookstalls. He later approaches them and takes them at knifepoint to a character called the Bookman (Sam Jaffe), who has the latter half of the book. The completed text tells the legend of the spell but does not give the magic words, which are engraved on a medallion formerly owned by Astoroth. The wizard had used his magic to imbue animals with anthropomorphism but the animals killed Astoroth, stole many of his magical spells and items, and escaped to the Isle of Naboombu, which is described in the children’s book which Paul is still carrying. The Bookman tries to grab Paul’s book, but they escape on the bed to the mystical island. Read more