Spellbound (1945)

Spellbound (1945) is an Alfred Hitchcock romantic psychological amnesia thriller with a noir nuance that cannot be denied. 

In some senses an outlier in the body of Alfred Hitchcock's own work, and not entirely styled in the mode of a more traditional or acceptable example of film noir, Spellbound does carry with it key noir themes of amnesia and psychoanalysis, and is as much a thriller as it is a psychological mystery.

Most of Spellbound's power comes as a romance story — always a strength with Alfred Hitchcock, who was as much a master of amour as he was of suspense.

Spellbound follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer.

The film is based on the 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer.

Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945)

The players include Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in the leading roles, with support from Leo G. Carroll, Steven Geray, Rhonda Fleming, Wallace Ford and Regis Toomey — to name some film noir regulars.

Support is also shipped in from Michael Chekov, a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Despite this pedigree it is fascinating to watch how relatively poorly this actor fares, simply by dint of not being used to working on screen.

Doubtless a tremendous stage actor, Michael Chekov seems to offer something far less nuanced than is given by Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, who display the stillness, implication and subtlety that works so well on camera — while Chekov seems to bluster in a more vaudevillian manner, offering a version of the nutty-European-professor caricature.

The psychiatric patriarchy courtesy of Alfred Hitchcock in Spellbound (1945)

The great advantage of studying a less than successful film by a director of Alfred Hitchcock's standing is that there is no end of research material, essays, anecdotes and studies of it.

Even the basics of the story of the making of Spellbound contain some worrisome details — largely around the input of producer and studio executive David O. Selznick — who for example brought in his own therapist, May Romm, to serve as a technical advisor on the production. It is even obvious from watching the film today that Dr. Romm and Hitchcock clashed frequently, simply because of the way that so much of the psychoanalytic discussion pulls in multiple directions.

Norman Lloyd in Spellbound (1945)

It can be imagined that someone on set who has zero knowledge of filmmaking is going to be a burden on someone like Alfred Hitchcock, whose knowledge of filmmaking was of course second to none. The reality of film making is not that it presents things as they are, but that it gives them the character of actuality, and always within a dramatic setting. 

This means that if an item of psychiatric trivia does not benefit the story, the drama, the romance or the suspense — then it may not sit well in the film.

Film noir and crime films of the 1930s and more especially the 1940s tended to portray psychiatric institutions as somewhat cold, clinical and even forbidding places — for which see Possessed (1947) or High Wall (1947) as strong examples. The premises and methods were dark and often shrouded, and as such likely perfect material for film noir.

Although Hitchcock's Spellbound showed psychoanalysis, psychologists, and mental illness, Hitchcock at first wanted to film Spellbound with clinical documentary realism, but decided to incorporate dream sequences instead, based on designs created by Salvador Dali. These designs were and remain a unique showcase of Freudian surrealistic montages, which include gigantic voyeuristic eyes and the psychological subject himself running in terror through a dreamscape.

Spellbound opens with a quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

"The fault...is not in our stars. But in ourselves...." 

In the contest of psychoanalysis, the implication is therefore that the answers to trauma and even crime lie buried in places that only the analysts can reach. The next title card reads:

"Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear...and the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul." 

The sanatorium in Spellbound, unlike the asylums more familiar from noir at large, is a delightful country club of a place, filled with light, bookshelves and swanky dining rooms.

Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945)

Travelling back through time from the American film noir of the 1940s to one of its root origins in the German expressionist cinema of the Weimar era, the best known asylum in early cinema is to be found in the psychological horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), which shows a disturbing  asylum and a series of murders told from an insane narrator's subjective point of view.

This mix swims confidently in the stream known as amnesia noir, and even comes with a twist — Edwardes, after he regains some of his memories, still believes that he is a murderer.

At the same time, this crazed tale reveals much of the trauma, fears and tensions of post-World War I German society. 

Later American crime pictures of the depression era such as Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) also featured psychologically volatile criminal, which depicted crime as a major social problem in American culture, and often not an unattractive problem either. 

However, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, and thanks in part to censorship and the simultaneous rise of psychoanalysis, American cinema grew more psychological, as seen in film noir at its best.

Film noir such as Spellbound and Whirlpool (1949) play the asylum differently and show respect for psychoanalysts reflecting their prominent status in American culture. In Spellbound and Whirlpool, analysts are depicted as respectable and wise pillars of society, people who are successful in society, and members of respected clubs and so forth. 

Leo G. Carroll in Spellbound (1945)

In addition, noir films like Spellbound, High Wall (1947) and Whirlpool (1949) indicate a reckoning with female roles, most particularly in the arrival of the female psychoanalyst — Dr. Constance Petersen  played by Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound (1945) — especially since she is deglamourised with her glasses and plain scientific lab coat. 

However as with Audrey Totter's character in High Wall (1947), she is able to be both a successful career woman in the psychiatry profession and engage in romance.

The psychiatric reality of Spellbound arises in the last third of the movie, when both Dr Petersen and her psychiatric mentor Dr. Alexander Brulov (Michael Chekhov) engage in Freudian psychoanalysis, in order to unveil the disturbed criminal unconscious and solve the crime. Brulov is a well-known expert in diagnosing amnesia, schizophrenia, and the guilt complex and attempts to dismisses her love for the patient, saying, "You're not his momma. You're an analyst."

While living with them in his vulnerable state, Gregory Peck comes down some stairs in a psychotic state with a knife, Hitchcock being Hitchcock wants the audience to think that he is going to murder his romantic doctor, however, Brulov sees an opportunity and sedates him with bromide in a glass of milk and the analysis begins. The murderer is ultimately revealed to be from the cast of psychiatric experts at the beginning of the film — a long time ago in fact — and here are many to chose from.

Alfred Hitchcock's Salvador Dali surrealist dream montage sequence in Spellbound serves to show how film noir more than any other style took a psychological point of view of crime, love and trauma, with dreams and nightmares being shown as part of a subjective inner narrative to convey mental illness. 

As Hitchcock himself said: “dream sequences in film were all swirling smoke, slightly out of focus, with figures walking through mist made by dry ice smoke”. It was a convention he sought to break, his desire being to do the opposite and express dreams with clarity —most fitting for cinema — and even more fitting for noir. 

Some of Dali's ideas such as “a cockroach with an eye glued onto its back moving across blank playing cards” were rejected — but others were not.

In one scene, for instance, to create a nightmarish atmosphere of “heavy weight and uneasiness”, Dalí envisaged suspending “15 of the heaviest and most lavishly sculpted pianos possible” from a ballroom ceiling and swinging them over the heads of cut-out figures below who, though caught “in exalted dance poses”, would not move at all, “they would only be diminishing silhouettes in very accelerated perspective, losing themselves in infinite darkness”.

Dali dream-sequence in Spellbound (1945)

Hitchcock was prepared to tackle this but sceptical Selznick only offered a reduced budget for this, and so he substituted miniature pianos dangling over the heads of live dwarfs. The final effect was one of several dream sequences that had to be eliminated.

Gregory Peck was always to remember part of what was lost, and he fully understood the logic behind this sequence, in which the audience would presumably share his nightmare. He said:

“There were 400 human eyes which looked down at me from the heavy black drapes. Meanwhile a giant pair of pliers, many times my size, would appear and then I was supposed to chase him, or it, the pliers, up the side of a pyramid where I would find a plaster-cast of Ingrid. Her head would crack and streams of ants would pour out of her face.”

When asked later why this did not come off Hitchcock drily said:. “The ants’ contract was cancelled.  We couldn’t get enough trained ants from central casting, and all of their fleas were already gainfully employed.” 

Selznick however had worried that the sequences would make audiences laugh, although the finished result was a sensation, even if it was much shorter than first planned. It was one of the things that made Spellbound one of the five movies for which Hitchcock was to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, and also a commercial success.

Ingrid Bergman and Wallace Ford in Spellbound (1945)

In film noir psychoanalysis is always also portrayed as both scientific and true, and the doubters — in Spellbound it is Gregory Peck — are shown to be wrong. On a wider footing, and across film noir more generally, the analysis of dreams can solve murders, and in some movies even helps the police and detectives in solving crimes — as in M (1951) The Sniper (1952) and even historical noir such as Hangover Square (1945).

Between May and July 1944, Selznick submitted several drafts of Ben Hecht's screenplay for Spellbound (1945) for approval from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who objected to various words and phrases in it, including "sex menace," "frustrations," "libido," and "tomcat."

Constance Petersen: Are you making love to me?

Dr. Fleurot: I will in a moment. I'm just clearing the ground first.

This resulted in alterations in the screenplay, including the removal of most of a character named Mary Carmichael, a violent nymphomaniac at Green Manors — played most enjoyably by Rhonda Fleming — and who starts the film in indeed, what can only be described as a 'tomcat' manner.

However, the suicide of Dr. Murchison in the screenplay — which typically violated the MPAA's rules against depicting suicide — was allowed to remain, as it was reasoned by Selznick that the character was clearly "of unsound mind," rendering him an exception.

Michael Chekov in Spellbound (1945)

Underlying all of this wonderful analysis was something that Hitchcock knew well — film noir's greatest asset — its fantasy. It was and is in fact fantasy to imagine that psychoanalysis can in this manner solve crimes and identify killers with such accuracy. It was and is an remains in fact fantasy to think that analysis can easily peel away trauma and heal crime and illness with the rounded satisfaction of a Production Code approved movie ending. 

While psychoanalysis presumes to being a method of scientific investigation, film is a fiction that aspires to spell-binding, which of course it does. The truthful psychology is in the storytelling, in the examples of the straight lines that Gregory Peck's character fears — the lines drawn by a fork on white table-linen — the lines on Ingrid Bergman's white robe and the ski lines on white snow.

Dr. Alex Brulov: Apparently the mind is never too sick to make jokes about psychoanalysis.

Like the train lines on their trip and the lines upon the white cover on the bed, these are cluster images which trigger the unlocking of he past, but they also underscore the sexual element, in that Dr. Peterson is the agent of their appearance: she wields the fork in the Green Manors cafeteria and wears the robe at their first intimate meeting. It suggest that psychoanalysis is more useful for Hitchcock as a way of coding his movies than it is for storytelling.

Another notice of interest for Spellbound concerns the theremin,  an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by a performer — who is known as a thereminist.

The instrument found great success in many motion pictures, notably, Spellbound, The Red House, The Lost Weekend — all three of which were written by Miklós Rózsa, the composer who pioneered the use of the instrument in Hollywood scores.

The score was supposed to be the first one with the theremin, which producer David O. Selznick was thrilled about. When he found out that composer Miklos Rozsa was also using the instrument in his score for The Lost Weekend, Selznick was furious. 

He knew that The Lost Weekend would be released before Spellbound and yes — The Lost Weekend was released in November 1945, and Spellbound in December 1945. 

Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick both responded favourably to the theremin-tempered sketch that Miklos Rozsa concocted for the scene in which Gregory Peck first lapses into a possibly murderous trance.

After Rozsa's and Samuel J. Hoffman's music for Spellbound won an Academy Award for best score, "the theremin gained instant status as an emblem for the unbalanced side of the human psyche" (Albert Glinsky 254). 

Constance Petersen: I think the greatest harm done the human race has been done by the poets.

Anthony Edwardes: Oh, poets are dull boys, most of them, but not especially fiendish.

Constance Petersen: They keep filling people's heads with delusions about love... writing about it as if it were a symphony orchestra or a flight of angels.

Anthony Edwardes: Which is isn't, eh?

Constance Petersen: Of course not. People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents.

Anthony Edwardes: Or... or... sometimes for no reason at all.

Constance Petersen: That's not the point. The point is that people read about love as one thing and experience it as another. Well, they expect kisses to be like lyrical poems and embraces to be like Shakespearean dramas.

Anthony Edwardes: And when they find out differently, then they get sick and have to be analszed, eh?

Constance Petersen: Yes, very often.

Anthony Edwardes: Professor, you're suffering from "mogo on the gogo."

Constance Petersen: I beg your pardon!

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