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Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a 1971 musical film produced by Walt Disney Productions which combines live action and animation; it premiered on October 7 1971. It is based upon the books The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons and Bonfires and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton. It stars Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson.
The film has similarities to Mary Poppins (1964): combining live action and animation and partly set in the streets of London.
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Quotations
You see, Colonel, things are not always what they seem to be.
Miss Price, after threatening to turn him into a toad, turns Charlie into a rabbit.Oh, bother. I do hate shoddy work.
Mr. Browne is approached by two scantily-clad dancers who take him by either arm.Lovely to see you—goodbye!
reading from Professor Browne's letter Technically a witch is always a lady except when circumstances dictate otherwise.
Children and I don't get on.
Victory for England, and St George!
Encyclopedia
Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a 1971 musical film produced by Walt Disney Productions which combines live action and animation; it premiered on October 7 1971. It is based upon the books The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons and Bonfires and Broomsticks, by Mary Norton. It stars Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson.
The film has similarities to Mary Poppins (1964): combining live action and animation and partly set in the streets of London. They share cast and crew members, namely Tomlinson, supporting actor Reginald Owen, songwriters the Sherman Brothers, director Robert Stevenson, art director Peter Ellenshaw, and music director Irwin Kostal.
Synopsis
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 hopes 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. 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 now can 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 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 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 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 human-like qualities and behaviours 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.
They land in the nearby lagoon and find a cartoon realm where fish can talk, and they can breathe underwater. Miss Price and Mr. Browne win first prize in an underwater dance contest, but a giant fishhook pulls the bed and the humans out of the water. An anthropomorphic sailor bear pulls the bed to shore and the group persuade him to take them to see the king, a lion who is looking for a referee for the royal football (referred to as "soccer" in the film) game. The king wears a medallion: the Star of Astoroth, which has the words to the sought-after spell engraved upon it. Mr. Browne, claiming to have captained Tottenham Hotspur, referees the game, sustaining substantial comic damage from the animals, and - using what he refers to as the "gypsy switch" - steals the Star of Astoroth from around the king's neck, replacing it with his referee's whistle.
The group use the bed to return home, only to discover that the Star cannot leave the cartoon world; the medallion has vanished from Mr. Browne's pocket. Paul reveals that the words of the spell have been in his nursery book all along. Miss Price attempts the spell, but is unable to control it. Mr. Browne is flustered when the children and a villager begin to treat him as a parent and a partner for Miss Price respectively; he hurriedly leaves for the train station.
During the night, a German raiding party invades Miss Price's house. She and the children are taken to the village armory and museum. Mr. Browne discovers Germans at the train station, cutting telephone wires and engaging in other acts of sabotage. After foiling them, he returns to Miss Price's home. Finding it overrun, he breaks into the workshed and turns himself into a rabbit to evade capture and follows the group to the castle. Having been left alone inside the castle, Miss Price casts the substitutiary locomotion spell on the old uniforms and weapons of the castle. The spell is successful, bringing into life everything on display as medieval Knights, Elizabethan Guards, Cavaliers, Redcoats, Highlanders all march off under the command of Miss Price, routing the Germans invaders in a comic action sequence.
The Germans retreat after detonating charges in Miss Price's workshop. The explosion knocks her from the sky, where she had been directing the magical attack astride a flying broomstick. This breaks the spell, and the army collapses as though deflated. The shed in which she keeps her spells is also destroyed. Since Eglantine has a rotten memory, she will no longer be able to do magic although she has few regrets as she has been able to perform some small service to the war effort, and, in any event, she felt that she could never be a "proper witch" because of how she felt about poisoned dragon's liver. Mr. Browne enlists in the British Army, promising to return. As he departs down the road, Charlie complains that they won't have any more fun - to which Paul replies "Well, still got this, en't I?", pulling out the magical glittering bedknob.
Differences between the books and the film
In the book:
- Carey (spelled Carrie in the movie), is the eldest child.
- The children stay with their aunt in the first part instead of Miss Price, with whom they stay in the second part. The aunt is the one with the bed.
- The children go to their mother's and the police station instead of Portobello Road.
- There were cannibals, not animals, on the island, which is named Ueepe, not Naboombu.
- The children go back in time to fetch Emelius Jones, whereas in the movie, Emelius Browne is a contemporary and time travel is unnecessary.
- There is no reference to World War II in the books.
- Emelius Jones is a necromancer.
- Eglantine Price remains with Emelius Jones in the past at the end of the second book, where they wed. In the film, Eglantine Price and Emelius Browne remain in the present where they are shown to be involved by the kiss Browne gives Price before marching off to report to his unit.
Release and later restoration
Bedknobs and Broomsticks was originally intended to be a large-scale epic holiday release similar to Mary Poppins, but after its premiere, it was shortened from its two and a half-hour length (while the liner notes on the soundtrack reissue in 2002 claims it was closer to three hours) to a more manageable (to movie theatres) two hours. Along with a minor subplot involving Roddy McDowall's character, three songs were removed entirely, and the central dance number "Portobello Road" was shortened by more than six minutes.
Upon rediscovering the removed song "A Step in the Right Direction" on the original soundtrack album, Disney decided to reconstruct the film's original running length. Most of the film material was found, but some segments of "Portobello Road" had to be reconstructed from work prints with digital re-coloration to match the film quality of the main content. The footage for "A Step in the Right Direction", however, was never located; as of 2009, it presumably remains lost. A reconstruction of "A Step in the Right Direction", using the original music track linked up to existing production stills, was included on the DVD as an extra to convey an idea of what the lost sequence would have looked like. The edit included several newly discovered songs, including "Nobody's Problems", performed by Lansbury. The number had been cut before the premiere of the film. Lansbury had only made a demo recording, singing with a solo piano because the orchestrations would have been added when the picture was scored. When the song was cut, the orchestrations had not yet been added; therefore, it was finally orchestrated, and put together when it was placed back into the film.
The soundtrack for some of the spoken tracks was unrecoverable. Therefore, Lansbury and McDowall re-dubbed their parts, while other actors made ADR dubs for those who were unavailable. Even though David Tomlinson was still alive when the film was being reconstructed, he was in ill-health, and unavailable to provide ADR for Emelius Browne. Some sound-alikes were criticized for not closely matching the original actors. Elements of the underscoring were either moved or extended when it was necessary to benefit the new material. The extended version of the film was released on DVD in 2001 for the 30th anniversary of the film.
The reconstruction additionally marks the first time the film was presented in stereophonic sound. Although the musical score was recorded in stereo, and the soundtrack album was presented that way, the film was released in mono sound.
Cast
The Children:
- Tessie O'Shea — Mrs. Hobday
- Arthur E. Gould-Porter — Capt. Greer
- Ben Wrigley — Portobello Rd. workman
- Reginald Owen — Gen. Sir Brian Teagler
- Cyril Delevanti — Elderly farmer
- Rick Traeger, Manfred Lating — German sergeants
The voices of:
Soundtrack
Although the film is in mono sound recording, the soundtrack for the film was recorded in stereo.
These songs include:
A song not in any current version of the film but intended to be so, as it was on the soundtrack album, was "A Step in the Right Direction" Ironically, it was this presence that was instrumental in the studio's decision to reconstruct the longer cut. Nevertheless, several moments in the film include underscoring of the song.
Academy Awards
The film received five Academy Award nominations and won one.
In popular culture
The Simpsons episode "Mypods and Boomsticks" plays off of the title, but bears no similarity in plot.
External links
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