(1945)
Spellbound is something of a stumbling
follow-up to Rebecca, producer David O Selznick’s previous collaboration with
Hitchcock. Selznick was a devotee of psychoanalysis, and the idea of basing a
film on the subject was already in the mind of the director. To that end, the
producer’s own therapist, May Romm, was brought in as a technical advisor (resulting
in Hitchcock’s famous response when she pointed out an inaccuracy, “My dear, it’s
only a movie”).
What ends up on screen is a mishmash of sometimes conflicting demands.
There's an earnest paean to the practice of psychoanalysis, which is undercut by the director’s devious
sense of humour. The “serious” (with 6o years hindsight it seems decidedly less so) exploration of the discipline’s magical curative qualities is fused
uneasily with the standard requirements of the Hitchcock suspense format.
Gregory Peck’s amnesiac impostor must be cured of his mental disturbance before
the Law catches up with him. Simultaneously, devoted brain care specialist
Ingrid Bergman is falling in love with him. And
there’s a murder plot to contend with.
Pyschoanalysis and its purveyors, as
depicted in the film, appear to be a fairly unprofessional bunch. They are
driven by ego, impulse, or worse, rather than the rigours of an exacting
discipline. Ingrid Bergman’s character (Dr Constance Peterson) is mocked as an
emotionless cold fish by her juvenile-minded peers, but she clearly just needs the
right man to come along in form of Peck’s headcase. After which her every
decision is based on impulse and emotional devotion. When it’s discovered that Peck is not the
real Dr Edwardes, the outgoing director of the hospital Dr Murchison (the
dependable Leo G Carrell, who featured in six of Hitchcock’s films) claims that
Peck is undoubtedly guilty of having murdered the doctor. If Murchison’s leap
to judgement seems understandable in hindsight, later on Dr Brulov (Michael
Chekov) makes the same pronouncement.
They haven’t spent any time examining the patient, they’ve leapt to conclusions, not so far from the inaccurate deductions made by the hotel
detective whom Bergman runs into.
The schematised presentation of Freudian
psychoanalysis means that every neurosis or fragment of a dream is a clue leading
to the solving of the patient’s personal mystery. This may then be revealed to the disturbed individual, resulting in an
instantaneous cure. While this approach allows the film to occupy a more
conventional suspense narrative, it renders glib any insights into Peck’s
malaise. Once the childhood memory he has repressed is exposed, he
is made immediately well (he joyfully announces that, although he knocked
his brother onto sharp railings when he slid down a banister as a child, he didn’t kill him
as it was an accident – a trauma-free life beckons!)
There’s much unintentional fun to be had
with Peck’s hysterical reactions to the prodding of his psyche. Early on, he
reacts badly to the sight of parallel lines drawn by Bergman on the tablecloth (“I take it the supply of linen at this institution is inexhaustible!”). I was
reminded of Steve Martin’s “Cleaning lady?!” outbursts in noir-spoof Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid. At other times, Hitchcock appears to be purposely having
fun (Bergman’s choice of liverwurst
sandwiches, when they go for a stroll round the hospital grounds). Peck makes
for a solid if slightly dour lead; Bergman seems to better suited the tone Hitchcock
is aiming for.
Apart from blossoming into
full womanhood on finding a tall dark stranger to lust after, Dr Peterson is
probably most identified by the parade of belittling remarks laid at her
gender’s door throughout. This another aspect you end up suspecting Hitchcock
was amusing himself with, so persistent are the comments (“We both know that the mind
of a woman in love is operating at the lowest level of the intellect”, “You're an excellent
analyst, Dr. Peterson, but a rather stupid woman”, and so on). Also noticeable,
for all her properness, is a rather laissez-faire attitude to her patients,
smoking away, being tactile, or wielding a paper knife in front of them (if one
wished to give too much credit to processes behind the script, one might view the two patients seen in the opening sections, one a nymphomaniac who claws at
a guard and the other a man convinced that he killed his father, as inverted
representations of Bergman and Peck).
The film works best, unsurprisingly, in the
suspense sequences, as Bergman and Peck repeatedly attempt to evade the authorities
hunting for him. Most of these involve Bergman lying for, or attempting to
protect, the man she is smitten with. Peck departs the mental institute,
pushing a letter under her door; a scene then plays out with half the senior
staff and the police invading her room to speak to her. The letter lies at their feet all the while, waiting to be noticed. And each time she and Peck
travel, helpful/suspicious authority figures must be deflected.
The director only completely nails the tone of the film when he has the opportunity to balance the subject matter with humour. The scene with Bill Goodwin’s aforementioned
house detective is one example, but it isn’t until Dr Brulov is introduced that
the film fully hits its stride. Making the psychoanalysts setting to work on Peck Swedish (Bergman) and Russian
(Chekhov) somehow gives them an added air of conviction even when the script fails to support them.
Chekhov was Oscar-nominated for his role, and he is frequently very amusing (“Any husband of Constance is a husband of mine, so to speak”), repeatedly mocking
Bergman’s romance-fuelled devotion to helping Peck. He also endears himself by
pulling the trick of apparent battiness concealing a keen intellect (drugging a
razor-wielding Peck with a bromide-laced glass of milk).
It seems strange that Hitchcock chose to
have little involvement with the famous Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence.
It was directed by William Cameron Menzies (Hitch wanted Joseph von Sternberg)
at Selznick’s behest, and it is said that the producer was responsible for reducing a
sequence that ran anything up to 20 minutes (according to who you listen to) to only two. Apparently Hitchcock wasn’t altogether happy with the
results either. Perhaps his hands-off approach resulted from weary experience
of Selznick’s dictatorial demands.
Another area that didn’t meet with the
director’s approval was Miklos Rozsa’s Oscar-winning score, which featured the
theremin. Rosza said he didn’t like it as, “it got in the way of his
direction”. Distinctive as the score is, I have to agree with Hitch on this.
Nevertheless, the director remains a very identifiable presence and he makes a big splash with
several shots in the film. The hallway of opening doors as Bergman and
Peck kiss for the first time (in its way as suggestive as the final shot of
North by Northwest) and the point-of-view down the killer’s gun barrel,
achieved with a giant fake hand, are the most noteworthy (into which a couple
of hand-coloured red/orange frames were cut, as the gun goes off).
The killer-revealed plot element that
rounds the film off looks almost as if it was an afterthought (particularly so
when you consider his identity). There’s a sense of “Where did that
come from?”, as if someone got cold feet at all the high-minded psychoanalysis and
decided audiences would feel shortchanged if the picture didn’t finish on a good solid
crime .
Despite slightly outré subject matter the
for-the-time the finished film is routine and faintly silly, enlivened by the
occasional bravura sequence. There is a seed of a more serious film
(Peck’s character was being treated for what we’d now regard as post-traumatic
stress by Dr Edwardes) but it ends up as an intriguing premise in search of strong storyline.
It might have been more satisfying to make a straight adaption of the novel
that inspired Hitchcock, The House of Dr Edwardes, in which a lunatic takes
over the asylum. Hitchcock referred to Spellbound as “just another manhunt
wrapped up in pseudo-pyschonalysis”, and it's hard to disagree with that appraisal.
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