“Spellbound” is a soupy, synthetic movie that will probably hold your attention. For one thing it deals, as few movies have, with the analysis of a man (Gregory Peck) who is said to be suffering from paranoia, schizophrenia and a guilt complex. What is more, it reveals the basic situation in psychoanalysis wherein the patient lies on a couch and says whatever comes into his mind, regardless of the consequences. It is also fairly accurate about some of the questions an analyst asks, some of the things a patient says, and both their reactions. The attitude is always youthful and wide-eyed and the movie as slow-motion and unbelievable as a story in the Woman’s Home Companion. The plot, which has to do with finding out who murdered the chief psychiatrist at Green Manors, a sumptuous mental home, and the attempt of the female analyst (Ingrid Bergman) to hide the accused while she analyzes him, is worked out with excessive care to give each step some degree of logic, but it is a logic you never believe in and you don’t feel that its director (Alfred Hitchcock) does either. Hitchcock’s methods of creating tension, fear and obsessive fascination in a character for some threatening or alluring object, have become very mechanical, but he still produces those elements better than most directors. Also he still makes a tight, streamlined mystery. There is a very good bit performance by Wallace Ford as a contemptuous masher from Pittsburgh. He is an integrated character who is above any rebuff, with one of the best drooping lips I’ve ever seen in the movies, an unusual seediness and loose posture and a wonderful way of talking in a completely done-in style.
The mixture of analysis and murder doesn’t come to much, especially for analysis. For one thing, Miss Bergman doesn’t look like an analyst. She still seems to believe, and is encouraged to believe, that she should enact the dream girl of a Phi Beta Kappa, which she does better than most Academy Award winners, but it is a role that limits this movie and almost any in which she appears. There is an almost imperceptible amount of characterization of the hero—he has the quality of being less a person than a sharp object. One reason for this is that only one brief instant of his past and little of his present are shown. When he comes into the picture he appears completely misplaced and he always seems to be suffering from the fact of being there. This is partly due to an excessive coldness about Mr. Peck and his look of seeming lost. He is racked almost as much as Lillian Gish was in “Broken Blossoms,” but none of his suffering projects any pain, nor do you get any sense of his feeling of guilt. Throughout, Hitchcock and his script-writer, Ben Hecht, imply that the hero is both completely capable and completely incapable of murder. Confusion doesn’t seem to be their aim so much as the fact that every time they imply the worst in their hero they are able to build a melodramatic situation.
The movie becomes much more enjoyable and closer to reality when, at the end of the first hour, the hero and heroine go to another analyst (Michael Chekhov). The scene starts off nicely by pointing up the difficulty people in waiting rooms have making their talk and actions seem sensible or unobtrusive. Mr. Chekhov is a cute approximation of Freud’s looks and does a good comic mimicking of the popular notion of the foreign analyst. The scene is written well and at length. Chekhov says especially sensible things, for instance that Miss Bergman has been carrying on unlike an analyst—which was noticeable from the beginning, when she flinched at the first thing one of her patients said. I wasn’t convinced at all that Mr. Peck himself got cured. It is my belief that the analysis, which takes about three hours and is performed literally on the run from the police, on a Pullman, in a New York hotel room and during a ski jump, was just getting started as the picture ended.
By this time the talent and intelligence that Hitchcock showed in his English movies have been diluted to the point where he no longer seems very talented or intelligent. The first meeting between Miss Bergman and Mr. Peck in the staff dining-room goes over, step by step, one of the most traditional and least sound maneuvers in movie-making—that for showing love at first sight: the instant in which they see each other is made to seem so long that the movie actually stops, and while it is stopped you are given close-ups of the two faces showing an incredible amount of understanding, love and shock. The average Hitchcock shot today is usually without an effective, provocative or original detail; the photography is an all-soft, warm, harmonious kind in which backgrounds are blurred out; his real efforts at expression now seem extraneous, utterly pretentious and often have a wooden-soldier articulation.
The enactment of the hero’s dream, based on Dali sketches, is a pallid business of papier-mâché and modern show-window designing. The moment in which the hero runs in ominous slow-motion down a steep plane has a great sense of the dream—of suspended atmosphere; it also has a quality recalling the kind of geometric distortion of reality that de Chirico practises.
The best movies I have seen recently are “Confidential Agent,” “My Name Is Julia Ross” and “The Last Chance”; “This Love of Ours” and “Pardon My Past” are even worse than “Spellbound”; “They Were Expendable” (directed by John Ford) and “And Then There Were None” (directed by Réné Clair) are in “Spellbound’s” class.
December 3, 1945