Hitchcock’s psychoanalytic thriller is handsome, sincere and faintly absurd, its science no deeper than a Sunday supplement. It survives because Ingrid Bergman plays every scene as if the love story were the real one, and because Hitchcock can still make a doorway frightening.
Spellbound opens with a card telling us that psychoanalysis is how modern science treats the troubles of the mind. What follows is a romance in a white coat. Ben Hecht and Angus MacPhail have taken a novel by John Palmer and Hilary St George Saunders and made it a story about a woman who cures a patient by falling in love with him, and Alfred Hitchcock has directed it as a thriller. The science is nonsense. The film is good anyway, for most of its 111 minutes, because of Ingrid Bergman and because Hitchcock can still make a doorway frightening.
Green Manors is losing its director, Dr Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), and gaining the famous Dr Edwardes, who turns out to be Gregory Peck, looking like an advertisement for a good night’s sleep. Dr Constance Petersen (Bergman), whom her colleagues tease for having a mind and no heart, takes one look at him across the lunch table and the film stops pretending otherwise. That night she goes to his room to talk about a book, and as they kiss George Barnes lays a row of doors over their faces, each swinging open in turn. We rolled our eyes for a second, then stopped, because it is what falling in love feels like and nobody had thought to draw it before.
Peck’s trouble is lines. A fork dragged across a tablecloth, the stripes of a dressing gown, the tiles of a bathroom at night: each one sends him rigid, and Miklós Rózsa’s theremin wails as though the furniture were haunted. Barnes lights Bergman soft and Peck hard, so she glows and he sweats, and when he is handed a glass of milk Barnes shoots from inside it, the white rising to fill the screen. It is a cheap trick and a good one. Hal C. Kern cuts the fits short, rightly, because the film knows they are slightly ridiculous.
The dream is the famous part and deserves to be, briefly. Salvador Dalí designed it: eyes painted on curtains that a man cuts with enormous scissors, a card game with blank cards, a faceless figure on a sloping roof holding a small bent wheel. Peck narrates it from an armchair while Michael Chekhov, as the analyst Brulov, unpicks it like a crossword. The pictures are strange and the explanation is not, and every symbol means one thing.
Chekhov is the best thing after Bergman. His Brulov shuffles about in a dressing gown, complains about being woken, pours warm milk and says aloud what we were thinking: a psychiatrist who runs off with a possible murderer needs a psychiatrist. Carroll is dry and watchful. Peck is handsome and inert; asked to play a man with no memory, he plays a man with no thoughts, and his panics look like someone about to sneeze. Most critics complain that he and Bergman have no chemistry. We would put it differently: she does all the wanting, and the film is about that, so it works.
In a New York hotel lobby, Bergman finds the man who has fled her and sits beside him without a word of reproach, and we were moved, more than the script had earned, because she plays the scene with her eyes and lets the dialogue take care of itself. Later, on a train, she invents a marriage for a stranger and is so bad at lying that we laughed aloud and liked her more. Howard Greer dresses her in plain tailored suits, so at her most reckless she looks like the sanest person on screen.
The last stretch has a chase, skiing in front of a painted mountain and a lot of diagnosis at speed. We will not say how it ends, except that the final shot is a proper Hitchcock shot. The film is thinner and sillier than Rebecca (1940), his previous picture for David O. Selznick, and looks like a rehearsal for Notorious (1946), made with Bergman the following year, which does this properly.
See it for her, for Chekhov, for the doors and the milk. Do not see it to learn anything about psychoanalysis, and do not sit next to anyone who has.
