Bedknobs And Broomsticks

Reviewer: Alyice Edrich

The Movie

The Plot

An apprentice witch takes in three orphans while practicing her skills so that she can stop the Nazis from invading her hometown.

Starring

Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, Cindy O’Callaghan, Roy Snart, Ian Weighill, and more.

Review

Bedknobs and Broomsticks first aired in 1971, when I was just three years old, so I have absolutely no recollection of the film. However, I am very familiar with Angela Lansbury’s work thanks to her starring role in Murder She Wrote and welcome every opportunity I can to see her in action. And on that note alone, Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a delight that should not be missed.

The film itself reminds me of a cross between Mary Poppins and The Sword In The Stone—and rightfully so, since the creators of Mary Poppins also created Bedknobs and Broomsticks. However, that can be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it’s a winning formula and a curse because many critics cannot get passed the similarities to allow the film to stand on its own merits—and therefore argue that it is a far inferior film and shouldn’t have been created in the first place. (I have to wonder, however, what those same critics would say now—having seen so many remakes and spin-offs of “winning formulas” outside of the Disney capital.)

The opening could lead to a much more solemn movie, but Disney quickly picks up the tempo and turns it into a song and dance number filled with enchanting characters and magical happenings.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks starts out with children being evacuated from Germany to a small British village. All but three children have found a home in the village, which leaves Ms. Eglantine Price to take on the remaining three children. There’s just one problem: she’s a recluse who likes her privacy and has a secret she doesn’t want exposed. So naturally she declines taking the children.

The children are all too happy to return to Germany when Ms. Price is shown a piece of paper ordering her to take them in—whereby she reluctantly agrees until a more “suitable arrangement” could be made. And that’s when she discovers the children are orphans—having lost both parents and their aunt to the war.

No sooner does she discover their news, do the children discover her news. Ms. Price is an apprentice witch who has been taking a correspondence course through a school in London in hopes of using her newfound skills to protect her village.

It’s also about this time that Ms. Price discovers she will not receive her final lesson because the magic school has closed its doors. A lesson she believed would make all her hard work pay off—a lesson that would stop the Nazis.

Determined to get the information she needs, she and the children take a magical trip to London where they meet up with her Professor. The professor, however, turns out to be a con-artist who knows absolutely nothing about witchcraft. He has stolen every lesson she received from a rare book which is missing the last pages.

With the professor’s help, Ms. Price and the children uncover the last lesson and ultimately save her village from a massive Nazi invasion—but not without a side trip to a magical, make-believe land filled with talking animals.

If I were to agree with one point made by the early reviewers, it would be that while the storyline tends to stay on track for the most part, there are sections in which the storyline shifts directions (i.e. frolicking about in a make-believe world) and causes one to wonder, “What were they thinking by adding that scene?”

Order Bedknobs and Broomsticks Today!