Spellbound

MOVIE #1,769 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 06.28.24 EVERY OTHER FRIDAY I’M REVIEWING THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. THIS IS TGI-HITCHOCK! I think the plot here is a bit needlessly muddled or overreaching, but the filmmaking and stellar Peck/Bergman performances more than make up for it. Reading about the backstory and how this was prompted by David O. Selznick’s personal experiences with psychoanalysis was really interesting. As was this note about the collaboration with Dalí on the dream sequence:

the sequence conceived and designed by Dalí and Hitchcock, once translated to film, proved to be too lengthy and complicated for Selznick, so the vast majority of what had been filmed ultimately was edited out. Two minutes of the dream sequence appear in the final film, but according to Ingrid Bergman, the original had been twenty minutes long. The cut footage apparently is now considered lost footage, although some production stills have survived in the Selznick archives. Eventually, Selznick hired William Cameron Menzies, who had worked on Gone With the Wind, to oversee the set designs and direct the sequence. Hitchcock himself had very little to do with its actual filming

It's really a cool sequence, and very well-done. William Cameron Menzies Director Focus when?

But never to be out done, there are wonderful Hitchcock flourishes all over the place, including this gun POV scene that ends in a red-splashed suicide...


Somehow, this is my first Ingrid Bergman movie — closing in on 2,000 films, better late than never — and she has an unmistakable charm. She would go on to work with Hitchcock two more times in the 40s: in Notorious and the lesser-known Under Capricorn. I look forward to them both.

I leave you with a special mini) super-cut of actor Michael Chekhov, who is excellent in a supporting role as Bergman’s mentor/father figure…

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
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Spellbound is a 1945 American psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, and Michael Chekhov. It follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer. The film is based on the 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer. It was released on October 31, 1945.