*** (out of ****)
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, and Leo G. Carroll
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1945 NR (should be PG)
A man walks into a psychiatric ward claiming to be the ward’s new head psychiatrist. He gets away with it for a few days, even becoming intimate with an attractive but cold female doctor on the staff. But his signature doesn’t match his autographed textbook and his behavior is increasingly erratic. Alone with his new love he confides in her, I’m not who I say I am. I think I killed that man, but I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything. Thus the stage is set for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” an entertaining thriller through a minefield of suppressed memories, Freudian slips, repressed sexuality, and a little Oedipal complex thrown in.
The handsome amnesiac and the voluptuous doctor, in the tradition of not just Hollywood but all fiction, make a go at solving the mystery themselves. Soon swarms of police are after them wanting to know what happened to the missing psychiatrist. The fugitives and the lawmen play some cat-and-mouse in hotels and train stations, but the crux of “Spellbound” is the doctor’s (Ingrid Bergman) investigation of the amnesiac (Gregory Peck), and the shaky relationship between them. On one level “Spellbound” is an enthralling whodunit, in which almost all the clues are locked in Peck’s trauma-shaken mind, and it's up to Bergman to pry his memories out of him. On a deeper and more intriguing level is Hitchcock’s not-entirely-optimistic view of the man-woman relationship, as seen through Bergman and Peck.
Their initial romance is not entirely convincing, but that’s not the point. The point is what’s going on beneath the surface, which turns the entire whodunit into a playing field for Bergman and Peck’s needs and weaknesses toward each other. Watch how, whenever Peck gets mushy, Bergman is at first glowing and eager, then subverts that sexual energy into a desire to solve Peck’s mystery, and notice how she only returns Peck’s mushiness as a reward after he has made a new discovery. Watch how her demands for him to extort his suppressed memories grow more and more vehement, until they’re shouting at each other, louder and louder, until they reach a climax. And notice how glad and tender she is when that climax is reached. Things go from complicated to positively twisted when Bergman takes Peck to her former teacher (Michael Chekhov). He’s a walking carbon copy of Freud himself, insisting that Peck think of him as a father just when Bergman is suddenly behaving more like a mother than a lover. This isn’t exactly fabulous advice, considering that the missing psychiatrist wanted Peck to think of him as a father figure as well.