![]() We learn in these first few minutes that the head of Green Manors, Dr. Unfortunately, this is only the first of many insulting female/doctor comments that come Constance’s way. Instead, she tells him that he’s not the first colleague to suggest she needs to let loose in fact, it happens quite often, and the colleague always seems to think she should go wild with him. Peterson does not remove her glasses, shake her hair from its tidy chignon, and pull Dr. Constance Peterson is much too cool and collected–he’d like to loosen her up a little.ĭr. Fleurot (John Emery) thinks Bergman‘s Dr. But in this film she’s rational and in control…most of the time. She’d almost lost her on-screen mind in Gaslight and won the Academy Award for her performance. I wonder if Ingrid Bergman, who’d spent some time in mental hospitals to research her role in Gaslight (1944), was excited or bummed to play the “sane” character this time. Hecht and Hitchcock researched the movie by visiting mental institutions in Connecticut and New York. He knew that psychoanalysis and Freudian theories would be great in a movie, so he focused the script on Bergman and Peck’s characters, eliminating the novel’s other subplots. Hecht, who wrote a million amazing movies, was currently a patient of psychoanalysis, and, like Selznick, thought it was fascinating. Screenwriters Angus MacPhail and Ben Hecht were hired to turn the novel into a movie. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer. The movie is based on a 1927 novel The House of Dr. A very slender and young-looking Gregory Peck is the new director of Green Manors, but when he arrives to take his new post, everyone realizes that something isn’t quite right…murder and mayhem ensues. Ingrid Bergman is a young, technically brilliant psychoanalyst employed at Green Manors. Most amusing to me is the doctors’ immediate unlocking of patients’ minds and dreams, and their miraculous assurances that once the repressed memory/dream/complex is brought forward, everything will be fantastic! (It usually is, too…)Īlfred Hitchcock seems to have been less enamored with psychoanalysis than Selznick: he later called this film “just another manhunt wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis.” The depiction of psychoanalysis in films of this era can seem old-fashioned and even cliched now, especially the stubborn emphasis on guilt complexes reaching back to childhood, amnesia, and dream interpretation. Try to remember how new and exciting all of this Freudian/psychoanalysis stuff was when this film was made–that might make it seem less ridiculous. The words are superimposed over the entrance to Green Manors, the institution for the “emotional problems of the sane” in which our story begins: The movie opens with a Shakespeare quote from “Julius Caesar:” The fault… is not in our stars, but in ourselves…” before giving us a handy tutorial in mental illness and psychoanalysis. ( Notorious (1946) was sold to RKO after production began.) So far he’d made Rebecca (1940) for Selznick, but would only make one more film for the producer after Spellbound, 1947’s The Paradine Case. Awkward.ĭirector Alfred Hitchcock was under contract to David O. Seventeen-year-old Rhonda Fleming, who appears in the opening of the movie as a very disturbed nymphomaniac, had to ask her mother what a “nymphomaniac” was before she arrived on set. The whole field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis was very new to most of America, so much so that the cast and crew had to be instructed in the pronunciation of the various terms and diagnoses used in the movie. Romm for one year, and one Selznick biographer saw Spellbound as Selznick’s “thank you” to the doctor. May Romm, employed as a “Psychiatric Advisor” on the film. Selznick was so enthused with psychoanalysis that he had his personal psychoanalyst, Dr. Selznick had apparently enjoyed a highly successful bout of psychoanalysis, and he wanted Alfred Hitchcock to make a movie about it. Freudian dream interpretation, guilt complexes, and the miraculous power of psychoanalysis (it can even solve murders!) take center stage in this film. Spellbound is one of several psychological thrillers produced in the 1940s when psychoanalysis was all the rage. Via: Unless otherwise noted, all images are my own ![]()
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