Hitchcock dives into psychiatry with mixed success in a middle-brow effort

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Ingrid Bergman (Dr Constance Petersen), Gregory Peck (Dr Edwardes/John Brown/John Ballantyne), Michael Chekhov (Dr Alexander Brulov), Leo G Carroll (Dr Murchison), Rhonda Fleming (Mary Carmichael), John Emery (Dr Fleurot), Norman Lloyd (Mr Garmes)

Spellbound was born out of Selznick’s faith in the magic of psychiatry. It opens with a touchingly naïve dedication that stresses a little touch of Freud is a magic bullet: “once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul”. Oh, would that it was so easy. Spellbound turns psychiatry as a sort of detective game, the subconscious a sort of smorgasbord of clues that, when shuffled into the correct order, will produce the answer.

The mystery is what exactly has happened to the new head of Green Manors Psychiatric Hospital, Dr Edwardes, here to replace the not-exactly-happy-to-retire Dr Murchison (Leo G Carroll)? The man who has arrived claiming to be Edwardes (Gregory Peck) may be charming but his odd obsessions with dark parallel markings on white surfaces, tendency to faint and lack of familiarity with psychiatry in general raise suspicions. Dr Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), leading light of the Hospital, deduces Edwardes or “JB” as he vaguely remembers his initials being, is suffering from guilt-induced amnesia. Petersen refuses to believe – despite mounting evidence – that this man she has fallen in love with could be a killer. On the run, she recruits her old mentor Dr Brulov (Michael Chekov) to help analyse JB’S dreams, convinced the answer to the mystery is there.

Selznick hired his psychiatrist to act as a consultant on the film. This didn’t matter that much to Hitchcock, who considered the film essentially another murder-mystery thriller with a bit of Freudian dressing and bluntly told the advisor at one point when she protested yet another inaccuracy “my dear, it’s only a movie”. Spellbound is a decent, mid-level Hitchcock effort, with a touch or two of the master’s invention and magic, but which slows down for an extended act three analysis scene crammed with dodgy psychiatry and a detailed Salvador Dali-inspired dream sequence.

Of course, no one watching the film (rather like Cary Grant in Suspicion) could ever believe for a minute that the charming, handsome Gregory Peck is actually a murderer. Hitchcock’s trick is to keep the tension up, since (at best) there are only two suspects (and only one of them has a heavily advertised motive). You could argue here the trick is a “howdunnit” rather than a “who”. What mystery is Peck holding in his head and why can’t he remember who he is? Hitchcock throws in a host of little flourishes to keep us guessing, and if he clearly cares very little about Freudian insight (just as well, imagine the field day Freud would have had with Hitch) that hardly seems to matter.

Spellbound still manages to fairly barrel along, with a sparky script by Ben Hecht interweaving screwball banter between Peck and Bergman with cod-psychiatry. Hitchcock lets most of this play out fairly traditionally, but punctuates it with moments of flair. An early romance dialogue takes place in voiceover over a series of shots of doors opening to reveal a never-ending corridor (a neat visual metaphor for delving inside the mind). A tracking shot on a disturbed Peck down a flight of stairs, focuses on a cut-throat razor in his hand, ending with the razor alarmingly large in-shot. Disturbing POV shots make objects appear ultra-large, from a glass of milk (echoes of Suspicion) to a gun barrel turned to face us at the film’s conclusion. All of this is accompanied by an excellent score by Miklos Rosza which brings together romantic strings and the theremin to suggest the unsettling undercurrents of the subconscious. Rosza, rightly, won an Oscar for his hugely atmospheric work.

Spellbound is also notable for the way it inverts gender expectations. Peck effectively plays the damsel-in-distress here. Vulnerable and scared about what he could do, he lapses into catatonic panicked silence as much as smooth banter. Instead, for all the film stresses her feminine weakness when in love, it’s Dr Petersen who is the protagonist here. Played with a relaxed authority by Bergman, Constance is an assured professional and a dedicated campaigner for the truth. It’s she who constantly drives the plot forward and its her who plays both doctor and detective to crack the case and confront (with an assured coolness) the killer.

Hitchcock’s film provides a subtle commentary on the experience of women. Searching for JB in a hotel lobby, Petersen is first pestered by a drunk traveller who drunkenly all-but calls her a cock-tease when she asks him to leave her alone. Even when saved from an unpleasant scene by a hotel detective, he assumes her to be a schoolteacher or governess, and Petersen immediately recognises that disguising her accomplishments is a perfect way to gain this would-be-saviour’s help. Petersen also has to shrug off the pestering attentions of a colleague (John Emery).

But it’s her who eventually deduces the meaning of JB’s dream. This dream was heavily promoted as the work of Salvador Dali. While full of striking imagery, it feels more like a pastiche of Dali, as if a Hollywood art director threw The Persistence of Memory and Eyes for Your Eyes at the wall see what stuck. Which is pretty much what happened: Dali’s work was largely discarded for being too weird and overlong and William Cameron Menzies was bought into create something in Dali’s style. Selznick hardly cared – what mattered was promoting the Dali collaboration (Hitchcock had little to do with the scene, until it drew praise and he then claimed authorship).

It’s another striking moment in Spellbound. But truthfully the film is a careful construction of striking moments and performances, which power a simplistic and unrealistic plot which relies on coincidence and bizarre logic gaps. Psychiatry is a magic bullet – it’s hard to imagine anyone in real life reacting with the sort of glee JB does here when he discovers he didn’t murder his brother in his childhood, only accidentally fatally impaled him on some railings outside his house. The “revelations” from the analysis takes an over-extended single session with the unconscious yielding a series of Agatha Christie-style clues.

But then that fits Spellbound in the tradition of Hollywood psychiatry, from this to Ordinary People to Good Will Hunting, a touch of confession on a couch eventually solves all problems (all the kissing Peck gets from Bergman – which didn’t stop off camera – also clearly helped). Hitchcock’s work here is professional, but middlebrow. However, the odd imaginative shot, and the impressive performances (Bergman, Peck and also famous acting-coach Michael Chekov, immensely playful and Oscar-nominated as Constance’s cuddly mentor) still make this an entertaining watch.