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When I was a kid, we taped the movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks (a 1971 musical fantasy movie starring Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson). It's not the best movie ever, but it's fun and we loved it. Angela Lansbury plays a woman trying to become a witch through a correspondence course in 1940, so that she can help the war effort. (She actually can do magic, it's just her spells tend to go wrong.) Since she lives in the country in a big old house with no family, she is assigned three evacuated children from London. There are shenanigans, they track down the guy running the correspondence course. He's a con artist, so they need to track down the other half of the old book he was using, and they end up on a magical island of talking animals, and they get home just in time for Nazis to invade. She foils them with the spell they tracked down, and the day is saved.
I just got a copy of it on DVD. The suck fairy has not visited it; it's still a fun and enjoyable fantasy romp.
The interesting thing is, I didn't realize that the version we had was edited. Wikipedia says the whole film was severely cut down just before release, so it's not an edited for TV thing. But they restored all of the cut footage for the DVD, so the movie is almost 20 minutes longer than the version I know. And while some of the stuff I can see why they cut (the bits added to the Portobello Road dance sequence don't add anything), most of it ... genuinely makes the movie better. Like the children's backstory. And there's a whole subplot with a slimy vicar who wants to ingratiate himself to the witch and marry her because she's got money. 99% of it was cut, but not all of it; in the edited version, he's just sort of ... weird and random. Then there are a whole bunch of humorous bits with bit characters that aren't really necessary to the story, but are fun.
It did inspire me to look up an interview Angela Lansbury did about the movie much later in her career, because her acting in the movie is not up to her usual standards. Apparently, they "pre-edited" the movie, what we would today call storyboarding it. Except they were apparently pretty fanatical about only shooting EXACTLY what was on the storyboard, and she apparently found it stifling to try and match her movements and poses to the storyboards.
I just got a copy of it on DVD. The suck fairy has not visited it; it's still a fun and enjoyable fantasy romp.
The interesting thing is, I didn't realize that the version we had was edited. Wikipedia says the whole film was severely cut down just before release, so it's not an edited for TV thing. But they restored all of the cut footage for the DVD, so the movie is almost 20 minutes longer than the version I know. And while some of the stuff I can see why they cut (the bits added to the Portobello Road dance sequence don't add anything), most of it ... genuinely makes the movie better. Like the children's backstory. And there's a whole subplot with a slimy vicar who wants to ingratiate himself to the witch and marry her because she's got money. 99% of it was cut, but not all of it; in the edited version, he's just sort of ... weird and random. Then there are a whole bunch of humorous bits with bit characters that aren't really necessary to the story, but are fun.
It did inspire me to look up an interview Angela Lansbury did about the movie much later in her career, because her acting in the movie is not up to her usual standards. Apparently, they "pre-edited" the movie, what we would today call storyboarding it. Except they were apparently pretty fanatical about only shooting EXACTLY what was on the storyboard, and she apparently found it stifling to try and match her movements and poses to the storyboards.
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Date: 2024-04-05 01:48 pm (UTC)From:Thank you for writing this up.
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Date: 2024-04-05 07:31 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2024-04-06 05:49 am (UTC)From:I didn't grow up on Bedknobs and Broomsticks -- I'd heard of it, but we never got around to watching it somehow, I don't think -- but it was deeply formative for my wife, so I've seen it a couple of times as an adult. A romp is exactly the word! And a very fun one.
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Date: 2024-04-06 07:40 am (UTC)From:Pretty much the only movies we had as a kid were things we could tape off television; Mom thought buying movies was a waste of money (until DVDs came out--the picture quality was enough different to make it worth it). So our movie collection was deeply eclectic, and we tended to watch them a lot.