9/24/2023 0 Comments Spellbound 1945![]() ![]() ![]() Running from the law and towards uncovering the truth about Edwardes’ death, Peterson coaxes the events from Ballantyne’s mind by analysing his dreams and studying his behaviour. Ballantyne suffers from dissociative amnesia: he cannot remember who he is, or why he poses as Dr Edwardes, but believes himself to be guilty of Edwardes’ murder. It’s Bergman’s character who drives the film, as she embarks on a journey with a man who calls himself Dr Anthony Edwardes – played by Gregory Peck – but who later turns out to be John Ballantyne. Peterson is sharp and stoic, and headstrong when it comes to rejecting the advances of both patients and doctors at Green Manors. “Your lack of human and emotional experience is bad for you as a doctor – and fatal for you as a woman,” Dr Murchison, the hospital’s soon-to-be retired director, says to Peterson in the film’s first ten minutes, hinting at his and his colleagues’ fascination with her cool professionalism and apparent lack of emotion. In it, Ingrid Bergman plays the psychoanalyst Dr Constance Peterson, the only female doctor at Vermont asylum Green Manors. Hitchcock and Selznick had had contract disagreements, and the making of Spellbound was largely due to the latter’s enthusiasm: the producer wanted to make a film that promoted psychoanalysis, having experienced its benefits himself, and put a great deal of money behind the project when Hitchcock showed interest in buying the film rights to The House of Dr Edwardes, the 1927 novel on which the film is based. One essay devoted to the truth behind the legendry of the Dali dream sequence is particularly worthwhile.Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound was a film originally conceived as a favour of sorts to producer David O. Hitchcock scholar Marian Keane offers a feature-length commentary, and countless interviews and essays complete the collection. Selnick's own depression and eventual desire to make a movie about psychotherapy) it's a highlight of the set. The insert booklet outlines the making of the film (including David O. Now released in a Criterion super-fancy edition DVD, there are as usual more extras than I can begin to count. (Hitchcock would revisit this blink-and-you-missed it finale with Psycho's abrupt transformation of Norman Bates.) In the end, it's worth watching, though the plot tends to slip away over time while you remember only the highlights of the film. Though the film is shot in black and white, the film washes red for a split second as a gun fires, ending the movie. The score won an Oscar, and the ending is also fantastically cool. The abbreviated Dali sequence (originally envisioned as a longer scene and pared back when it was shot) is spectacular - the closest example of genuine art we have on celluloid. Nonetheless, Spellbound has moments of crowd-pleasing delight. Peck plays the character, as instructed by Hitchcock, with an utterly blank, lost, and slightly confused look which makes him more pathetic than sympathetic. J.B., meanwhile, becomes fascinated with virtually every object around him, with each little detail setting off some repressed memory or another. The "psychotherapy" in the movie is both ridiculously simplistic and overwrought, with Petersen certain of J.B.'s innocence. Ingrid Bergman always tends to ham it up anyway, and her Nordic accent and mannerism turns her instantly into a female version of Freud. explains a crazy dream (visualized by Salvador Dali), which is promptly psychoanalyzed, curing its patient. A whirlwind road trip ensues with, of all things, an in-depth psychotherapy session, as Edwardes/J.B. Eventually he goes on the run with (real) therapist Constance Petersen ( Ingrid Bergman), accused of murder. Gregory Peck plays a psychotherapist named Anthony Edwardes - that is, until he's revealed to be an amnesiac nut case named J.B. Freud's ideas had really taken off, and wouldn't you know it, the time was right to make a movie based on the notion. Back in 1945, the idea of psychoanalysis was just coming ito its own. The entire plot is one of Hitch's more absurd (adapted from the novel The House of Dr. Spellbound lands as one of Hitchcock's classics but it's far from his best work. ![]()
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