This divided film obligingly provides us with a vivid and appropriate, albeit probably unintended, emblem of its own divided nature early in its central dream sequence: the image of an oversized pair of scissors cutting through an eye painted on a curtain.

Robin Wood notes, comprehensively, a “split in the thematic material,” a switch from murder mystery to love story as apparent generic model, and a shift from John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) to Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) as apparent protagonist” (44). Most of Spellbound‘s critics see the film as informed by some such tension, if not always, or not exclusively, in terms of its handling of psychoanalysis. He argues that this confusion, however, is the film’s redeeming virtue, that its “interest lies in the nature of its ‘badness’: in the tension between the affirmation and justification of fundamental ideological assumptions, and a repressed meaning which is everywhere at odds with them” (80). Thomas Leitch, for one, believes that that is precisely the problem with the film, that “Hitchcock is so determined to penetrate the mysteries of his hero’s troubled mind that for the only time in his career he takes the MacGuffin as seriously as his characters do” (130).Īndrew Britton claims that the problem with the film’s treatment of psychoanalysis is not simply that it is too serious, but rather that it is so deeply and fundamentally confused. Most of Hitchcock’s critics, however, seem to think that Spellbound takes its psychoanalysis, “pseudo” or otherwise, very seriously indeed. Hitchcock himself seems later to have regarded this earnestness as something of an embarrassment, assuring Truffaut that the film was really “just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis” (165). Not a very sophisticated account of psychoanalysis, admittedly (nor even, as it turns out, a very accurate foreshadowing of the film’s plot), but earnest to a fault. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusiondisappear … and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The solemn opening title, more suggestive of docudrama than melodrama, immediately announces this ambition in the most explicit way: Spellbound was not only, as Thomas Leitch says, Hitchcock’s “most determined attempt to employ the jargon and images of psychoanalysis”(130), it was probably Hollywood’s most ambitious attempt up to that time to introduce the talking cure to a mass audience. Ironically, this very overtness of the film’s concern with such questions is often held to be the source of its problems. On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock’s films in which “questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied – questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo – become overt subject matter” (138). Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock’s masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor a Vertigo (1958).

Many, even among Hitchcock’s admirers, would agree. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that “one can make no claim for Spellbound as an achieved work of art,” citing, among its shortcomings, “the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script” (83). Just about everything about Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film’s critical reputation. Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eye,Ī Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV, ii, 192-197. This paper was presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000.

Spellbound 1945