Spellbound

Miklos Rózsa composed the outstanding score for Hitchcock’s early stab at a psychoanalysis suspense movie. It’s a rare example of the theremin being used outside of the scifi genre, though even here the aim was to connote an “other-worldly” atmosphere for the scenes of psychiatric distress and dream sequences that were designed by Salvador Dali.

Ingrid Bergman plays Constance Peterson, the only female psychologist at Green Manors mental hospital. When Dr Edwards (Gregory Peck) takes over the facility, Constance is attracted to him, but becomes concerned both about his behaviour and about his true identity…

Granted, the ideas about therapy espoused here are naive, entertainingly so, but the movie itself is best seen as one long, two hour dream sequence, preposterous, but still, somehow, meaningful.

Hitchcock embellishes it with characteristically brilliant twists, like the infinite variety of parallel lines which etch their way through Peck’s mind. The imagery is sometimes overblown (doors open magically down a corridor when Peck and Bergman kiss), and the dream sequences designed by Dalí are exactly what you’d expect; but there are moments, especially towards the end, when the images and ideas really work together.

Time Out

Beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader