Alfred Hitchcock (1945)
The film is famous for its Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence and Gregory Peck’s mental ‘demons’ make for some amusing images (especially lines drawn with a fork on a white linen tablecloth) but there’s a ton of wordage in Spellbound. Although the script was written by Ben Hecht and Angus MacPhail, the words become tiresome – almost as if to confirm a received prejudice against psychoanalysis: that it’s all talk. Psychotherapeutic technique is used to unravel the mystery of how Peck’s character, John Ballantyne, comes to be impersonating Dr Anthony Edwardes, the new head of a Vermont clinic called ‘Green Manors’ (which suggests a retirement home rather than a mental hospital), and why Ballantyne reacts badly to the sight of anything remotely resembling ski tracks. When the real Dr Edwardes is found murdered, Ballantyne is the suspect. He holes up in a New York hotel; Ingrid Bergman, as a bona fide shrink who’s fallen in love with Ballantyne, follows and proceeds to analyse him.
A buried trauma is a good enough excuse for spinning things out but Alfred Hitchcock spins them out for too long. I’d seen Spellbound twice before (first at the Electric Cinema in the summer of 1980) but it didn’t zip along as I expected. The start of the movie is promising, though: Hitchcock seems amused by the psychoanalytic milieu. There are theatrically disturbed patients (Rhonda Fleming, Norman Lloyd) and Hitchcock presents the Green Manors staff – except for Bergman’s Dr Constance Petersen and the expert Leo G Carroll as Dr Murchison, the retiring head of the clinic – as inadequate too. John Emery’s fatuous Dr Fleurot seems jaded by his professional spiel and his colleagues (Steven Geray and Paul Harvey) are dull. Gregory Peck wouldn’t be the first man you’d think of to play a tormented psychiatrist so it’s probably as well that he turns out to be playing a man pretending to be a psychiatrist and, thanks largely to his trauma-induced amnesia, not knowing why or how to get a handle on his odd behaviour. Peck’s acting is limited as usual but his youthful handsomeness gives him an appealing quality of innocence here. He and Ingrid Bergman are good together – just as well in view of the ponderous working out of what’s in Peck’s troubled mind. Although Bergman’s character is meant not to be a real woman until she’s motivated more by passion for John Ballantyne than by science, she’s actually at her most amusing and likeable when she’s rattling off psychoanalytic stuff – a showoff swot – early in the film. Constance is ravishing when she’s bossy and reproving – there’s a particularly funny scene when she first goes to Peck’s New York hotel and is pestered by a man from Pittsburgh in the lobby. Wallace Ford is excellent in this cameo role; so is Michael Chekhov as Constance’s mentor Dr Brulov. On the surface, he’s a kind of homey version of Freud but Chekhov, as well as handling his (many) lines with dexterous wit, also suggests a father figure who doesn’t want to lose Constance to a younger man.
2 May 2013
