Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Bedknobs and Broomsticks presents itself as a whimsical wartime fantasy, a film content to entertain children without troubling itself overmuch with the ideological commitments of its era or any subsequent one. It is, by any reasonable measure, a product of 1971 that has aged into something approaching a historical artifact. The film concerns itself with the adventures of evacuated children and their unlikely guardian, a woman devoted to amateur witchcraft and the pursuit of magical knowledge. There is nothing here that suggests the filmmakers were particularly invested in interrogating their own assumptions about gender, class, race, or the nature of power itself.

The presence of Angela Lansbury as an unmarried woman of independent means and intellectual pursuits represents perhaps the film's only tangential connection to progressive sensibility, though this is incidental rather than programmatic. She is not presented as a model of liberation so much as a harmless eccentric, a stock character type that predates modern progressive cinema by decades. The film's treatment of World War II functions as pure backdrop, a plot device to explain why children require temporary guardianship. There is no interrogation of the war itself, no engagement with its moral complexities, no examination of how trauma might affect the evacuees. The conflict simply exists as scenery.

This is a film uninterested in the social consciousness that would later define cinema in the 2020s. There are no meaningful discussions of systemic oppression, no celebration of diverse identities as such, no lectures delivered through character dialogue. The film is refreshingly innocent of the burden of contemporary sensibilities. It simply wants to show us dancing suits of armor and magical adventures. One respects, if nothing else, its singular lack of pretension to social relevance.