‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ Let Angela Lansbury Literally Soar as a Sassy, Nazi-Fighting, Self-Made Witch

Dame Angela Lansbury passed away today at the age of 96, leaving behind a legacy that spanned from 1944’s Gaslight — for which the actress earned her first Academy Award nomination — to the iconic signing teapot Mrs. Potts in 1994’s Beauty and the Beast. She won her fourth of five Tony Awards originating the part of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, played an iconically unhinged mother in Stanley Kubrick’s The Manchurian Candidate, and welcomed herself into every 1980s and ’90s living room as Jessica Fletcher in the super-hit Murder, She Wrote.

But it was Angela Lansbury’s role as a single, sassy, Nazi-fighting, self-made witch in Disney’s 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks that captured my imagination as a child. Miss Eglantine Price was unlike any woman I had ever seen on film and she remains an idiosyncratic heroine full of modern feminist gusto, unbridled ambition, wit, and courage. Bedknobs and Broomsticks is further proof of what a towering talent Lansbury was and how many of us she touched in her vast and varied career.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks opens in the small English coastal town of Pepperinge Eye during the height of World War II. Some locals are patriotically blackening out signs to stymy potential Nazi invaders while others are being forced to take displaced London children in during the bombings. Miss Eglantine Price is frustrated when she learns she has to shelter three orphaned cockney siblings Charlie (Ian Weighill), Carrie (Cindy O’Callaghan), and Paul (Roy Snart). It’s not just that Miss Price is a single lady who enjoys her child-free life. No, Miss Eglantine Price is secretly studying to be a witch via correspondence course so that she can fight Nazis with magic.

Photo courtesy Everett Collection

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is often compared to Mary Poppins, another musical film about a magical woman who enlivens the lives of English children and a sad man played by David Tomlinson. While I loved both as a strange Anglophile Irish-American kid in the suburbs, Bedknobs just had more bite. It was far more metal. Bedknobs and Broomsticks was less about the importance of prioritizing family over work than it was about creating a found family and using magic to kill Nazis. The flirtation between Miss Eglantine Price and Tomlinson’s Mr. Emelius Browne was more Spencer/Tracy than chaste nothings between Mary and Bert. The kids in Bedknobs were hard-scrabble and street smart. The big bad wasn’t the concept of capitalism, but literal Nazis, crashing on the shores. Bedknobs and Broomsticks just ruled.

But the best part of Bedknobs and Broomsticks was Lansbury’s heroine. Miss Price is introduced on motorbike, sporting a purple beret, a waxed cotton jacket, and no fucks. She’s not there to foster children, but to pick up her “parcel,” which we later learn is the titular broomstick. She literally says, “Children and I do not get on.” And while she discovers how to be her own sort of maternal figure by film’s end, Eglantine Price is never forced to whittle down her ambition or eccentricities. In fact, her rabid desire for knowledge is what kickstarts the adventure. Her insistence on learning a particular spell is what fuels their odyssey and eventually saves the day.

The grand finale of Bedknobs and Broomsticks is an eerie sequence when Eglantine finally harnesses her powers and unleashes them upon the Nazi invaders. With the words, “Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee,” she calls upon spirits at her local museum to rise. She leads them into the field of battle upon — what else? — broomstick. And she naturally saves the day. It’s a thrilling sequence for any kid with an interest in medieval history, magic, and besting fascism. It’s also an incredible moment where Lansbury’s innate cozy charm collides with her dark edge, showing her full power as a performer.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks might not be Angela Lansbury’s most famous work, but it is nonetheless influential. She played a defiantly unique heroine who enchanted us all with her grace, charm, and literal magic.

RIP Dame Angela. Real ones know the power “Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Satis Dee” and that Angela Lansbury taught us you don’t have to be born with magic. You, too, can learn to be a witch via correspondence school.