Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with psychoanalysis and the complex workings of the human mind inarguably peaked with Psycho, but fifteen years earlier, he made an initial foray into the inner lives of psychotherapists and the patients that they analyze with 1945’s Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Spellbound finds Dr. Constance Petersen (Bergman, in the first of three collaborations with the director) in residence at the Green Manors psychiatric facility, where she is the only woman on the staff, and as such often finds herself having to fend off the unwanted advances of her insufferable colleagues. The hospital is in the process of being handed over from long term head of staff Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carrol, in his third of four collaborations with Hitchcock) to the incoming Dr. Anthony Edwardes, following an event in which Murchison was found to be negligible, possibly as the result of the early stages of senility. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives, and a romance blossoms between him and Constance almost immediately, although their early interactions are fraught with tension when he seems to change into a different kind of man altogether whenever he sees images of parallel lines against a white background: the tracing of fork tines in linen, the pinstripes in Constance’s white dressing gown, train tracks, etc. In short order, it becomes clear that “Edwardes” is an impostor, and he reveals to Constance that he is an amnesiac with the initials J.B., and he flees to New York from Green Manors just before the arrival of the police, who confirm that the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and his unknown travelling companion is suspected of killing him. 

Spellbound decidedly falls into the realm of Hitchcock’s domestic crime thrillers, as opposed to his espionage-oriented ones, but it’s also an example of one of his lesser-considered genre films: melodrama. One needs to look no further than the film’s opening to see this, as this is, to my knowledge, the director’s only film in which there is an overture. It’s certainly a much more successful one than a certain later Hitchcock/Bergman collaboration, however, as the film never quite loses its thriller edge. Although the picture occasionally flirts with going for a full-on soap opera plot, there are enough touches of malice and menace to carry it to the finish line, and the thrills of the second half more than make up for some of the occasionally plodding romance scenes in the first. Although the contemporary audience may not have been primed to view Peck as an actor who was consistently known for portraying characters of high moral fiber (To Kill A Mockingbird was still seventeen years away) to the same extent that a modern audience would be, they certainly would have been able to see the vulnerability, confusion, and occasional hints of danger in his handsome face. We trust that Constance knows the inner workings of the human mind but are less convinced that she’s a strong judge of character, especially as she falls in love for the first time in her life, blinding her to the pieces of evidence that J.B. may, in fact, be exactly the dangerous criminal that the police think him to be. He’s certainly capable of turning malicious in an instant, and when he begins to stalk about the home of Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), in which they’ve found shelter, with a straight razor, we’re not certain that either Constance or Brulov is safe. As such, the film’s narrative structure is superficially similar to that of Suspicion, although Spellbound is a much stronger film. 

Often, when a Hitchcock film becomes hard to find or is somehow neglected, it’s because it contains some problematic element that has caused it to fall out of favor. Secret Agent, which sees Peter Lorre doing a racist caricature in brownface, seems to only exist on bargain bin DVDs with transfers that look like they were remastered by being thrown down the stairs. Even on the Criterion app, no one attempted to quality check the subtitles for Young and Innocent, and one can only conclude that it’s because whoever was working on captioning the thing saw the grotesque Blackface at the end and threw their hands in the air. Spellbound has fallen out of print and isn’t streaming online anywhere, and I wondered over the course of the film if this had anything to do with what could be perceived as pervasive sexism throughout the narrative, although I would argue that the prejudice is on the part of the characters, not the text, since all of the people who underestimate Constance are proven wrong. Her male colleagues at Green Manors all consider her frosty, cold, and unwomanly. When she makes her way to the Empire State Hotel, she is first harassed by a drunken man who propositions her before he’s turned away by the hotel’s staff detective, who incorrectly diagnoses Constance as either a schoolteacher or a librarian and credits himself as being “a bit of a psychologist.” Constance, who actually is, is able to prey on his hubris and play the part of the repentant wife looking for her husband, thus tricking him into revealing what room J.B. is staying in. Among her peers at Green Manors, she’s also the only one to spot the thread that reveals that someone there knew the real Edwardes and thus knew J.B. was an impostor all along, eventually resulting in the downfall of the true culprit and the liberation of J.B. from prison. It’s another example of Hitchcock’s messy relationship with women and feminism. He may have been a terror to women who worked on his sets, but he also never passed up an opportunity to show a woman’s mind was more than capable of matching wits with a man. I’m not sure why this one isn’t more easily accessible or well-remembered; I only managed to catch it the first time on TCM years ago, and was only able to rewatch it on the VHS tape that I used to record it, lo these many years ago now. 

Visually, this is also one of Hitchcock’s finest. The slow establishment of J.B.’s fugue states when he sees parallel lines leads to an utterly fantastic two-minute dream sequence that includes images that were created by Salvador Dalí, and they are utterly beautiful and surreal. When Dr. Brulov tricks J.B. into drinking drugged milk, we see the image from his point of view as he raises the glass and drinks from it, the creation of a pure white horizon foreshadowing the revelation that the traumatic incident that caused his amnesia took place on a ski slope. The entire film is in black and white, save for two frames of red when the camera takes on the point of view of the end of the barrel of a gun as it fires. It’s great stuff, and given that Hitch was feuding with Harry O. Selznick at the time and wasn’t as invested in this as he was in films he was more passionate about, it’s a great insight to just how good the man could be even when he was only half-assing it, at least at this point in his career (his half-assery in his later works does not compare). I’m not sure where you might be able to find this, dear reader, other than perhaps through your library or browsing the thrift stores, but when you do, you’re going to enjoy it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond