Spellbound (1945): C

Freudian symbolism and Salvador Dali surrealism uncomfortably coexist in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychobabble classic Spellbound, which despite its pedigree – Hitch, Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, Notorious screenwriter Ben Hecht – now stands as one of the director’s most laughably dated films. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives at Green Manors psychiatric hospital and, while cultivating a relationship with sexually repressed coworker Dr. Constance Peterson (Bergman), begins exhibiting some serious mental health problems of his own. Dr. Edwardes freaks out whenever he sees lines on a white background, and can’t remember anything about his own book “Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex,” hinting (quite obviously) at his own guilty conscience about a traumatic past event. One of Hitchcock’s first American films, and a project instigated by legendary producer David O. Selznick after his own therapeutic experiences with psychiatry, the film may have been a topical groundbreaker in 1945, but in today’s culture of Prozac, repressed memory revelations, and pervasive therapy, its infatuation with hokey medicalese can be pretty embarrassing. It also doesn’t help that Peck and Bergman have virtually no chemistry together, and that the film, despite thematic concerns about memory and identity, takes its bland Macguffin – namely, What is it from Peck’s past that’s plaguing him? – more seriously than its marquee stars’ tortured romance. The film’s most memorable moment is the trippy dream sequence created by Dali, yet even with this interlude’s chilling, mysterious beauty (and its apt reference to the iconic Dali/Buñuel collaboration Un Chien Andalou), it's hard to ignore the silly second-rate stuff – Dr. Peterson’s exaggerated frigidness, her faux-erudite haughtiness, and Peck’s ridiculous-looking fainting spells – surrounding it. As always, Hitch’s camera exhibits its usual expressive, inventive magnificence (such as a shot through Peck’s drinking glass), but compared to the master of suspense’s previous and future knockouts, it’s tough to be mesmerized by Spellbound.

Comments

[Andrew Spark]

I think this from being close to someone who has studied mental health problems, particularly young offenders.

[Nick]

Um, you think what?