Bell, Book and Candle

Gillian Holroyd is a witch living in New York's Greenwich Village, where she runs a shop selling African art and keeps company with a Siamese cat and her aunt and brother. When she learns that her new upstairs neighbor, a book publisher named Shep Henderson, is engaged to a woman she dislikes from her college days, she uses her magic to turn his affections toward herself. The spell works, but Gillian soon finds that her own feelings have become real, and that love carries a price for a witch: the loss of her powers.

Richard Quine directed this romantic fantasy comedy, working from a screenplay by Daniel Taradash and produced by Julian Blaustein for Columbia Pictures. It sits between Quine's 1954 film Pushover and his 1964 releases Sex and the Single Girl and Paris When It Sizzles. James Stewart plays Shep opposite Kim Novak as Gillian, with Jack Lemmon as her brother Nicky, Ernie Kovacs as the writer Sidney Redlitch, Hermione Gingold as Bianca de Passe and Elsa Lanchester as Aunt Queenie, among a credited cast of twenty-five.

The film runs 106 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from around 15,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 6.6 from roughly 263 votes, indicating a modest but settled following over the decades. A critics' rating of 6.4 from sixteen reviews places it close to the audience scores, suggesting broadly comparable assessments from both groups.