Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock weaves his spell binding magic into this Francis Beeding novel. In some opinions, this is Hitchcock's best project from the 40's. Powerful stars and a great story line keeps your interest until the final shot.

An amnesia patient(Gregory Peck)is believed to be a psychotic killer. Bits and pieces of his memory about a childhood accident makes him believe that he is a murderer. Ingrid Bergman plays a young psychiatrist, who helps Peck unravel his past and regain his memory and mental health. During this process, the lovely doctor tries not to fall in love with her needy patient. She takes him to her old professor(Michael Chekhov) for help. He is reluctant to get involved with solving the mystery to clear the patient's name.

Brilliant camera work and being filmed in black & white really helped the story line. There is an eye opening dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali that is down right mystic.

The strong and talented cast also includes: Regis Toomey, Leo G. Carroll and Rhonda Fleming. This film is worth the time to watch again and again.

"Spellbound" is a psychological thriller that tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum (Peck) who turns out to be an imposter. It's love at first sight for Constance (Bergman), a psychiatrist at the asylum, who falls for Anthony (Peck). However, his amnesia and dizzy spells reveal that he isn't the man he says he is, and he may have actually killed the man he's pretending to be.

As things begin to unravel and the situation becomes public knowledge, Anthony does a runner and Constance leaves the asylum to track him down. The pair reunites and Constance quests to prove the innocence of her new lover.

This movie has suspense written all over it. I'm a big fan of Hitchcock movies, especially the cinematography. I love it when the shot cuts to a new location or landscape - almost in complete silence. It gives a certain eerie 'what's going to happen here?' feel to it. Even in the opening titles with the bare tree branches rattling in the wind - you know you're in for a real treat with that spooky music.

At times Peck's character does come across a bit of wimp during his funny 'spells' where he flashes back to a time when he THINKS he may have committed a crime. You want him to pull himself together and snap out of it, yet it's part of the plot so all is forgiven.

When all the signs point to guilt Constance, in what we can only assume is her own delusion and blindness, refuses to believe that Anthony could ever do something so heinous. Her scepticism rings true towards the end when her psychiatric training comes in handy and we discover what really happened. She calls on the expertise of her former mentor, played by Michael Chekhov, who plays the part of the probing, and rather peculiar, psychoanalyst well.

Bergman and Peck make a terrific pairing. The love their characters have for each other is so convincing, you pray (and hope) that Anthony is innocent and it's all a misunderstanding. Bergman portrays Constance's desperation so well - she is desperate to prove Anthony is a good man despite his multiple admissions of guilt.

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.

Alfred Hitchcock makes his customary quick cameo at 38:52-38:55 at the Empire Hotel lobby in New York City. He's exiting an elevator, smoking a cigarette.

While I wouldn't include 'Spellbound' in my top five favourite Alfred Hitchcock movies it's still wonderfully entertaining. Of course it had dated badly in some ways, but not enough to spoil a modern viewer's enjoyment. Psychoanalysis was still quite a cinematic novelty at the time, but this means that we have to put up with an awkward opening sequence, complete with "explanations" on the screen, and a few pretty hokey moments throughout, but hey, I can live with that, and the amateurish filmed skiing scene. These few flaws, quite a rarity for Hitchcock, are still small potatoes. The legendary Salvador Dali designed dream sequence allegedly used very little of the great surrealists outlandish ideas, but even so it's striking and memorable. I also really enjoyed the inventive score by Miklos Rozsa, which utilized the eerie sound of the theremin, later used in the science fiction classic 'The Day The Earth Stood Still', and The Beach Boys psychedelic pop masterpiece 'Good Vibrations'. Now the best thing about 'Spellbound' and what really makes it into a wonderfully entertaining mystery/romance is Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. These two Golden Age superstars are both absolutely wonderful individually, but together they are magical, and one of THE great romantic couples in movie history. 'Spellbound' may not be Hitchcock's very best work, but I still highly recommended it. I can't see how anyone could not enjoy it.