I've been catching up with Hitchcock movies lately, as I previously only had two of his most well-known gems,
Psycho and
The Birds, under my belt. One that I watched recently and had never heard of is
Spellbound, which came out in 1945, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
Bergman plays a psychoanalyst at a mental hospital (back then they were known as looney bins.) She's a bit too serious and the male doctors accuse her of being too intellectual and not very expressive. Then one day the new head of the hospital, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck), arrives and turns out to be surprisingly young and good-looking. He and Constance fall in love. However, Edwardes has his own problems: whenever he sees a white object with black lines on it, he pretty much freaks out. And as Constance soon finds out, Edwardes is not the man he appears to be. He turns out to be suffering from a severe case of amnesia.
Let's stop right here. Someone with a mistaken identity gets the boss job. The boss develops a romantic relationship with one of his subordinates. Only in Holly-oh, wait, never mind. It happens today, too.
Anyways, with the use of dream analysis Bergman and Peck set out to unravel his personal mystery. Can I just say that Gregory Peck sure was a hottie? I guess I'm so used to seeing the older side of Peck in movies like
Moby Dick that I was unaware of what a pretty boy (man) he was when he was really young. Hottie alert!
There are some really unintentionally funny scenes in the movie, a victim of Hollywood's idea of effective film making at the time. The first is when Peck and Bergman kiss for the first time; Hitchcock shows a close-up shot of her face, and then his face, and then a close-up shot of her lips, and then his lips, and then when they zero in on each other to play sucky face we see a series of doors opening. Ah yes, my love! Your kiss has opened up all of the doors for me! And of course, the music swells to an eardrum popping level during this erotic moment. Actually, it swells all throughout the film - if they gave out Oscars for "Most Overused Examples of Unnecessary Background Music",
Spellbound would be a shoe-in. If you closed your eyes, you'd still know when an intense moment was taking place.
Then there's the pivotal skiing scene that takes place towards the end of the movie. This past winter, I tried both downhill and cross country for the first time. Peck and Bergman are clearly doing downhill, as they hike alone to the top of a mountain (some ski resort. Where's the gondolas? And they're the only two up there!) But wait, as they make their descent they lean forward and zoom cross country style in a straight line down the mountain. And of course, we see the quintessential, "realistic" movie making technique of putting actors in front of a blue screen while a fake background scrolls behind them. Faster and faster Peck and Bergman go down the mountain, all the while perfectly parallel with each other, and standing straight up despite the fact they must be going 85 MPH. It's here where Peck has his memory jogged; as a child, he accidently killed his little brother while sliding down some stairs and pushing him into spiked railings.
Then his memory completely returns; it's a miracle! He remembers that his name is John Ballentine (rhymes with Valentine), and for a brief while the lovers are happy. But then Ballentine is arrested for murder.
If Hitchcock had ended the movie here, I would've been satisfied. Why? It's more realistic that way - good-looking guys who are too good to be true usually ARE too good to be true in real life. Life doesn't always work out the way we'd like it to. You don't always get the boyfriend that you want. Tough break, sister. But of course, this is Hollywood. Hitchcock had to go and ruin it for me with a twist and tack on a happy ending.
One of the more interesting scenes in the movie was the dream sequence conceived by surreal artist Salvidore Dali. It's typical Dali, with walls made out of eyes (creepy), a man with his face covered up, and a giant flying bird. Dali's scenes originally ran 20 minutes long but producer David Selznick hated most of his ideas and cut them down to five minutes or so.
Spellbound did keep me spellbound, though - with some of its badness. Proof that Hitchcock's best days were clearly still to come.
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