Spellbound (1945)

The head of the famous Green Manors mental asylum is being replaced by a younger psychiatrist, Dr Edwards. When Edwards arrives he falls for Dr Petersen and she for him. However, after exhibiting some very strange reactions, Edwards is exposed as a fraud - an amnesiac who has deep issues and may or may not have killed the real Edwards prior to taking up his job. Blinded by her love for him, Petersen flees the police with him and protects him as she tries to uncover the truth locked deep within his mind.

As someone who watches way too many films for my own good I probably should have seen Spellbound many years ago. Making up for lost time I watched it recently unsure of even the basic plot. I was surprised by the twist (which I guess for 99% of those watching this, won't be a twist) that Edwards was not who he claimed (thought) to be. The psychoanalysis against the clock scenario was a bit too tidy, but it does work well. I'm not a big believer of this world of therapy so some of the scenes stuck in my throat but it was proof of Hitchcock's ability that he managed to make them tense.

The example that came to my mind was the film Blackjack by John Woo in which Dolph Lungren is scared of the colour white! In that movie I was almost in fits of laughter when Lungren is stopped in his tracks by the bad guys spilling lots of milk everywhere! Here there was no such reaction to Edwards' similar fear. The director really manages to bring out tension and paranoia in every scene – there was nary a moment where I wasn't involved in the film, it was hard to know whether Edwards was a killer, a nut or what! Some of the imagry is a little obvious (doors opening) but most is good and the Dali dream sequences are pretty cool.

Of course part of this is down to Peck playing just perfect. Some of his bug eyed reactions to lines etc would have been comical had he not been able to follow through, but he did. It is to his credit that I was kept guessing as to his intentions right through the film. Bergman is also good but has to carry lines such as `I believe him because I could never feel this way for a man with badness in him' (I'm paraphrasing), the romantic side of the film is harder to carry but she does it well. Support is good, but Leo G Carroll looks very young indeed and took me by surprise when I saw him!

Overall I enjoyed this film even though there was so much that could have been a mess. It is to Hitchcock's credit that he cranks the tension up well and never lets it get silly (as it could easily have been in lesser hands). Some of it is a little too easy (isn't this deep seated stuff meant to take years rather than days?) but this aside it moves swiftly along and is a very interesting way to make a thriller.

Fmovies: A world in which Freudian psycho-analysis works as it's supposed to is rather like a world in which magic works - so call this film a fantasy. There's nothing whatever wrong with fantasy. Indeed, there's nothing better. Hitchcock announces at the very beginning that the story takes place in a Freudian world; thereafter he plays perfectly fair with us.

He even chose the right collaborators for a fantasy. The dream sequences were designed by Salvador Dali. (Anyone whose dreams really do look like Dali paintings maybe COULD do with some psycho-analysis.) They're not frightening - dream sequences rarely are - but they are at any rate more interesting than the usual dreams we might have or hear about. The music was by Miklós Rózsa, maybe the best of the composers who settled in Hollywood, certainly the most vividly overpowering. He was exactly the right choice for this film - however much Hitchcock disliked the score, or said that he did.

The story follows a confused Gregory Peck, who cannot remember key episodes of his recent (and not so recent) past, and who may, just possibly, be a dangerous criminal. Ingrid Bergman is a second-generation disciple of Freud who despite her professional caution finds herself falling in love with him. Perhaps it sounds cardboard already, but the performances invest the characters with more life than my descriptions did. Peck in particular is highly sympathetic. He comes across as not at all mad, not even mentally disturbed - just a man who can't remember one or two things and has an odd aversion to things like parallel lines. (That?s right - parallel lines.) Anyway, as I said, it's a fantasy: the forces of psychoanalysis must unravel the mystery before it's too late. (Why there's a "too late" is too complicated to go into.) The usual kind of Hitchcock suspense isn't there but the man WAS capable of moving outside his home genre now and then. Remember, his other fantasy was "The Birds".

This is one of my favorite movies, despite what I must reluctantly admit is a preposterous plot. But what a great cast -- Gregory Peck, the beautiful Ingrid Bergman, and various familiar character actors. Wallace Ford has an entertaining scene as an obnoxious hotel guest trying to pick up Ingrid Bergman, but who gets chased off twice by the house detective. Even though the plot elements are often unbelievable, it doesn't matter, as far as I'm concerned; the pacing is just right, the script is literate, and the dramatic tension sustains the viewer's interest to the end.

And for my money, this movie contains one of the most, if not THE most, romantic scenes ever put on film: Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, having met only a day or two before, admit to each other that they've fallen in love. He walks slowly toward her and she lifts her face to him and closes her eyes. The scene dissolves to a series of lovely doors opening slowly down a hall, to the accompaniment of Miklos Rosza's incomparably beautiful "Spellbound Theme". Now THAT'S romantic! I highly recommend "Spellbound" to any classic movie fan.

Spellbound fmovies. I recently saw this film on the large screen after having not seen it for over 10 years. My memories of it were not that fond -- I recalled it as an unusually melodramatic and not very convincing thriller enlivened by a very attractive cast.

What I had forgotten about was how almost impossibly silly all the psychoanalytical claptrap is, especially in the first couple of reels, which thereby make us feel very quickly that we're not quite in the mature, masterful grip of Hitch's usual wit and taste. Yes, I know this was made in the 40's, but the first 20 to 30 minutes of the film have more sexist moments and infantile behavior by supposed doctors than one would ever expect from either Hitch or Ben Hecht.

So who's to blame? One guess -- David O. Selznick! That being said (along with the fact that the story doesn't really add up to much of anything, since all the premises on which it's based seem so shaky, naive and downright goofy), the film has some things going for it. About midway through the picture, when Michael Chekhov appears as Dr. Brulov, the film suddenly kicks into what we might call "classic British Hitch mode," with the kind of understated wit and ensemble playing the director had been doing so well since the early 30's. It almost becomes another (and far more palatable) film at this point. The scenes with Bergman, Peck and Chekhov are the highlight of the film, and I have to admit that I'm even kind of fond of the hotel lobby scene, with the appealingly breezy Bill Goodwin (of "Burns and Allen" radio fame) as the house detective. Peck has never been more handsome, in a strangely fragile way.

Also worth a look are the brief but truly unusual Dali-designed dream sequences. There is something to be said for Miklos Rozsa's score as well: although it edges a bit far into soupy overscoring, the expressive main theme has quality, and his use of the theremin (which he also employed in his score for THE LOST WEEKEND at virtually the same time) is striking and represented "something new" in film music.

One could easily make excuses for this film based on "it was only 1945" or "what people knew about psychoanalysis was still naive", etc., but even taken in context of its time it's a pretty silly film without the kind of sustained surety of style leavened with simultaneous suspense, intelligence, taste and humor that he had already proved he could do so well from more than ten years earlier. Given a standard he had already given us with examples from THE 39 STEPS or YOUNG AND INNOCENT through THE LADY VANISHES in the UK, or FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT and SHADOW OF A DOUBT here in the US, this film seems not up to his true capacities, and like his other Selznick-produced American film, REBECCA, seems both overfussy and filled with emphases and spoonfeeding of details which Hitch himself would never have given us.

You need only compare this film with his very next one, NOTORIOUS, to be painfully aware how much better Hitchcock on his own -- using his own standards of pace, momentum and the ADULT treatment of script themes -- could be when not under the thumb of Selznick. Thank God he didn't have to work for him any more after this.

Cinema works best as even-handed, non-egotistical collaboration. Total control by one individual can be hit-or-miss, depending on their proficiency. But what is almost always disastrous is the collision between two dominating personalities. Of the four features produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound is probably the one in which suffers most from them treading on each other's toes.

Selznick was a rare kind of producer, who rather than simply trying to come up with the most successful money-making formulas, also used his pictures as showcases for his own favourite themes. Spellbound was the result of a passing interest in psychoanalysis, and while Hitch was apparently not against the idea of doing a shrink flick, Selznick's influence places too much emphasis on it. It's also ridiculously laudatory, the foreword and opening scenes giving you the impression that psychoanalysis is as straightforward and effective as prescribing a dose of antibiotics.

The structure of Spellbound is also not ideally suited to the Hitchcockian mode of suspense, which was based upon revealing the identity of the villain to the audience and then creating tension from making us wonder when and how they will strike again. Sometimes, as in Shadow of a Doubt or Rear Window, the killer would not be identified with certainty, but Hitch would immerse us in the suspicions of the central character, and this worked just as well. In some respects it looks as if Spellbound is an example of the latter. There appear to have been some attempts to create suspense out of the possibility that Gregory Peck's character is a murderer, and there are some typical Hitchcock moments like the business with the razor that play upon this. The trouble is, all those point-of-view shots placing us inside Peck's innocent confusion make it impossible for us to accept him as a killer, not even one who has forgotten his crimes. As such these tense moments, while nicely constructed in themselves, have no impact. The final "twist", when it arrives in the last five minutes seems tacked on, and does not shock or satisfy in any way.

Spellbound is also an example of why we don't see many outstanding acting performances in Hitchcock movies. It's not just because Hitch didn't give any coaching to his cast members (neither did William Wyler, and his pictures are always superbly acted), it's just that his films are too technical to show off the actors to the best of their abilities. Ingrid Bergman was an exceptional actress, but because of the way Hitch works, the key moments in her performance are cut up into fleeting reaction shots, close-ups of hands and so forth. The best impression we get of her acting is in a fairly mundane scene, when she is fending off the unwanted attentions of Wallace Ford, a moment Hitchcock allows to play out in a mid-shot unbroken take. Spellbound does contain one of the few Oscar-nominated performances in a Hitchcock picture – Michael Chekhov as Dr Brulov. He is not bad, although due to the nature of his part he gets the benefit of more conventional shots which capture his best – hence why he got a nod while Ms Bergman didn't.

The one Oscar that Spellbound did win was for the Miklos Rozsa score, although it's inferior to his work on The Lost Weekend, which was also nominated. His music for Spellbound is a little overbearing, and is incredibly heavy in the romantic scenes. It's also very sweepingly sentimental, which jars somewhat with Hitch

Could this one be the most underrated of all Hitchcock's American movies/What?only 7.6?And however,you've got plenty of movies for the price of one!Come on ,wake up,and give this triumph its due!

1.It's a mystery movie:Peck suffers from amnesia,he may or may not be a criminal,only snatches of memory come back and he can't put them together.Some clues appear,the "lines" vision is the most famous.

2.It's a movie full of suspense;great scenes:the letter which Bergman tries to hide,the news papers at the railway station.

3.It's a chase movie:Bergman and Peck escape from the nursing home and search a shrink's colleague help.

4.It's a dreamlike movie:not only for the Dali's -too often unfairly dismissed-dream.Actually, the whole story is wrapped in a supernatural,eerie atmosphere.

5.It's a romantic story:the scenes outside the nursing home in country landscapes are wonderfully and lovingly filmed.

6.It's a movie of redemption:Bergman falls in love with her patient,and she's got to struggle -thanks Mister Freud- to help Peck to recover his

full memory.

7.It's a technically astounding movie,as in every Hitch movie:it features the shortest color scene (it's a black and white movie)in cinema.And I won't tell you when it appears,watch out.

8.It's a movie from the Master of suspense,and I trade you "a lapse of memory","shattered" and "the third day " for "Spellbound"!It deserves to be in the top 250!