APOLOGY FROM ALYSSE – Somehow the first version of this came out in Plaintext! Sorry.
Film Review: Spellbound
A Viennese psychiatrist in this movie demands a dream “the more cock-eyed, the better” and Hitchcock obliges with this wildly uneven picture offering us Alfred at is best and worst. This film about psychoanalysis is schizy; pretentious, illogical, childish and afraid of its own emotions. Unfortunately it starts with an awkward, talky beginning in which misogynist doctors accuse Ingrid Bergman (for the first time in her life, I’m sure) of being a “glacier” who’s uninterested in men.
No one heats up a screen like Ingrid Bergman, shooting smoke and fire in all directions from the get-go and it will surprise nobody to find out she and Gregory Peck conducted a hot affair during filming.
Dr. Constance Petersen is a psychoanalyst at an upscale Vermont looney bin full of nymphos and weirdos, galvanized by the arrival of Gregory Peck as the new doctor in charge and he’s just as worked up about her. It doesn’t even faze her to discover that he’s an impostor, the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and her swain is accused of his murder.
The film begins to gather speed as the couple goes on the run together with Connie telling everyone they’re on their honeymoon. She takes the amnesiac to her training psychotherapist’s house in Rochester where she promises to “cure” him.
Her teacher tells her that “love smitten analysts playing dream detectives” make “the best patients” but she is making good progress breaking down Peck’s resistance when the police show up and the couple flees to a ski resort called “Gabriel Valley”.
The famous dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali is pretty interesting – gamblers in a club decorated with eyes, a man tumbling down a rooftop and a masked man laughing behind a chimney brandishes a wheel. Constance interprets this as her boss murdering Edwardes on a ski vacation to prevent the younger man from replacing him and framing her lover for the crime.
When she tells this discovery to her boss he threatens her with the very same gun, but she faces him down and he shoots himself instead. Seen from the killer’s perspective the gun fires directly at the screen.
Film ends with Constance Petersen and her Big “100% Cured” male making out at the train station. To get to this point Hitchcock had to battle a sappy film score, (Bernard Hermann wasn’t available), a bossy, clueless, tone deaf producer (David O. Selznick) and a woman-hating screenwriter (Ben Hecht) to ignite a modicum of his signature passion and suspense. At least it was a huge hit and broke all records. What a film this could have been without the frozen art direction, the awkward rear projection and the hysterical film censors. Someone should definitely take another stab at it.
Alysse Aallyn 
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