Alfred Hitchcock made so many timeless films, but Spellbound, alas, hasn’t held up quite so comfortably. Most of the problem has to do with its theme: psychoanalysis, which enjoyed a trendy moment in the mid-forties and may have attained enough relevance at the time to drive a plot, but now seems a rather weak engine. That era’s therapy craze swept up picture’s producer, old-Hollywood titan David O. Selznick, with such force that he personally asked the director to take it on as a subject. Hitchcock grudgingly agreed, setting the production gears turning on Spellbound. Selznick arranged for his own therapist to both act as the movie’s technical adviser and to cause Hitchcock a number of on-set headaches. So if Spellbound seems faintly un-Hitchcockian, we can chalk it up partly to Selznick’s psychoanalytic zeal, but some of the credit must also go to Salvador Dalí.
Hired to craft a dream sequence, the Spanish surrealist painter and filmmaker reportedly produced over twenty minutes of footage, four and a half minutes of which appear in the clip above. “I can’t make out just what sort of a place it was,” Gregory Peck mutters, reclined on the therapist’s couch, as the shot dissolves into his mind and into Dalí’s imagery. “It seemed to be a gambling house, but there weren’t any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors, cutting all the drapes in half. And then a girl came in with hardly anything on and started walking around the gambling room, kissing everybody.” Surely those days offered no more ideal candidate for the job of realizing such a vision than Dalí. The lightly theremin-ed score comes from Miklós Rózsa, but Hitchcock didn’t like that either. Though the famously controlling auteur may have found his power compromised in its production, Spellbound does end up being a rare thing indeed in the history of cinema: dream sequences compelling enough not to put you to sleep.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
One of my favorite movies, wish I could see the entire dream sequence uncut.
I’d take SPELLBOUND — “weak engine” and all — over most thrillers made in the past 20 years.