Despite getting good reviews and several Oscar nominations when it was first released in 1945, in the long run, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, the second of four films he would make with powerful independent producer David O. Selznick, has gotten a pretty bad rap. Consider that, in the lengthy, book-length interviews François Truffaut conducted with Hitchcock, the section on Spellbound takes up less than two and a half pages, and Truffaut proclaims that he found the film to be "something of a disappointment." In Robin Wood's canonical study Hitchcock's Films Revisited, he also devotes a scant few pages to the film, most of which are in relation to its star, Ingrid Bergman (who, it should also be added, has been quoted as saying that she doesn't think it "is a particularly good movie"). And Pauline Kael declared that, despite its intriguing ideas, "Spellbound is a disaster."

Spellbound thus takes its place as one of Hitchcock's most underrated efforts, one that has generally been written off as a failed experimental work, the good parts of which were worked out more satisfactorily in films such as Vertigo (1958) or even Marnie (1964). This is not to say that Spellbound is an unsung masterpiece; it is, quite frankly, a flawed film. However, it is still an important work in both Hitchcock's oeuvre and cinema in general because, not in spite of, its experimental nature. In it, Hitchcock was expanding on his thematic preoccupations, playing with notions of the fantastical, and attempting to incorporate an important cultural revolution—in this case, the use of psychoanalysis—into his work. Although virtually all of his films fall conveniently under the generic label "thriller," Hitchcock was always trying to do something different.

One of the reasons Spellbound has been looked down on critically is because the narrative is, even more so than most of Hitchcock's films, terribly convoluted and not particularly convincing. It plays with many of Hitchcock's favorite narrative devices, particularly the falsely accused man on the run, but its attempt to intertwine a suspense narrative with psychoanalysis so that the two feed off each other ultimately turns out to be awkward and too often forced, leading to overworked explanations that simply don't ring true.

The story, which was vaguely inspired by a 1927 pulp-Gothic novel called The House of Dr. Edwardes, opens in a mental institution. The main character is a cool, scholarly analyst named Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman, in the first of three starring roles in Hitchcock films). Constance is book-smart and experience deprived, confident that everything she needs to know can be found on the page.

Constance's icy and starched demeanor melts when the new head of the institution arrives, a handsome young man named Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck, then a rising star under contract to Selznick). It is love at first sight, but such romances are never without their complications, and in this case it is eventually revealed that Dr. Edwardes is not who he says he is, and he may be responsible for someone's murder. However, for the first time in her life, Constance goes on her feelings, rather than her intellect, convinced that the man she loves is innocent and suffering from a deep-seated guilt complex that she can help him to overcome. The second half of the film follows them as they run from the authorities, eventually taking refuge with Constance's aging but still wily mentor, Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov).

Because psychoanalytic film theory has been one of the favorite tools to unlock the secret subtexts of Hitchcock's large body of work, it is only appropriate that he was one of the first filmmakers to explore psychoanalysis as a subject in one of his films. Although it is a conventional romantic suspense-thriller in many ways, Spellbound is really about psychoanalysis, which was first gaining widespread recognition as a legitimate form of psychiatric therapy in the 1940s. Therefore, Spellbound was ahead of its time, although its primary discovery is that psychoanalysis is more interesting as a way to study films, rather than as the subject of one.

The most obvious problem is that psychoanalysis is, by its very nature, talky and drawn-out. And, therefore, Spellbound is an incessantly talky film, with every significant action being explained in long-winded speeches about guilt and repression. It's like having the last five minutes of Psycho (1960) spread out across an entire movie. Screenwriter Ben Hecht, who also penned Hitchcock's next film, the superior espionage thriller Notorious (1946), was fascinated by psychoanalysis, and his enthusiasm for it caused him to overplay his hand, leading him to use it to explain everything, no matter how forced.

Hitchcock noted, in his interview with Truffaut, that "the whole thing's too complicated, and I found the explanations toward the end very confusing." In fact, I would argue it's the other way around: The explanation at the end is far too tidy and unconvincing in the way it boils everything down to a moment of confrontation on a ski slope in which Peck's character relives a repressed past experience and suddenly everything comes together. Granted, there is a further complication after that, which eventually leads to Constance unmasking the true murderer, but even that is coyly explained in psychoanalytic terms, thus pointing up the primary flaw in psychoanalysis itself: its assurance that everything in the human mind can eventually be explained within a limited set of terms based almost entirely on theoretical conjecture.

There are several stunning setpieces in Spellbound, however, and it contains some rich visual imagery. The most famous, of course, is the "dream sequence" in which Peck's character relates a dream he has had, which is then visualized on-screen in a florid combination of paintings, set design, and optical effects based on paintings by famed surrealist artist Salvador Dalí (although it was Hitchcock's idea to hire Dalí, the sequence itself was eventually storyboarded and directed mostly by William Cameron Menzies, best known as the production designer for Gone With the Wind). Although the dream itself is used rather laboriously to explain every facet of the murder mystery, it is a compelling bit of visual cinema that overwhelms us during its brief duration.

While its imagery is often impressive, the film's chief strength is in Ingrid Bergman and her performance as Constance. Like her character in Notorious, Constance is the true hero of the film, a strong, independent woman who isn't afraid to assert her values and beliefs. On the surface, it would appear that her intellect and steely demeanor soften once she falls in love with Peck's character (the sexist old adage that all a professional woman needs is a real man to bring her back to femininity), but it's important to realize that it is Bergman's character who is constantly helping Peck's, not the other way around, and it is she who is eventually responsible for solving the film's mystery. Bergman plays Constance with a combination of determination and a deep-seated urge to protect, two characteristics that make her one of the strongest female characters in all of Hitchcock's films.

Copyright © 2002 James Kendrick