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Perhaps not spellbindg but definitely binding!
Hitchcock elicits a mixed bag of emotions from me. I am just a little too young to have been transfixed, dare I say spellbound?, by the man and his works as millions of Americans were during Hitchcock's peak. Being a callow youth at the tale end, so to speak, of his career and unappreciative of the art I remember that Birds scared the b'jeezus out of me, that I was too young to watch Psycho, and very little else.
Everything else I saw at a later date seemed fine but dated, perhaps quaint. It came as a huge surprise then to finally discover and appreciate the man's art simply by watching this movie.
The story revolves around a young professional woman who goes on the lam with a man who is at once her boss, her patient, her true love and a murderer. Sounds complicated, I know, and perhaps uninteresting because too much, but this movie really works. It helps that Ingrid Bergman is at the top of her game and plays the role of naive, beautiful, love-struck maiden with sublimity. Gregory Peck, the leading man, does an adequate job of portraying the anguish and anxiety of a man on the brink of madness.
It is Hitchcock's genius itself which gives the film its hard edges and enjoyable quirks, (He, by the way, is the man leaving the elevator with a violin case), through very simple plot devices. He has an amazing ability to change the mood in the movie in an instant merely by inserting a certain piece of music, or placing one signature next to another without anything else changing (It is no coincidence that Hitchcock's most notorious scene can be conjured with just three notes from a violin).
In this film Hitchcock pulls us along as the film proceeds from mundane to sinister to charming to chilling to disappointing and finally to shocking and all the while the audience is left thinking to itself that the ending is fairly predictable if one is given three or four chances to guess it. You know what? You never will.
Spellbound is spellbinding
Not the greatest Hitchcock film, but ironically it has four of Hitchcock's greatest sequences, all of them mind benders as befits a crime story about headshrinkers gone rotten. The famous Salvador Dali dream sequence is everything it has become famous for, a spectacularly subtle and understated seduction sequence - itself almost a dream - and the famous single frame "red flash" at the climactic confrontation. The film is in black and white yet Hitchcock and Selznick induced the company to insert a single or pair of red frames at humongous expense in a subliminal bit that freaked the audiences. This is called power in Hollywood. For the next 40 years nobody restored the red flash - until Turner and Criterion did the disk - too ridiculously expensive for B&w prints and VHS.
And the score - fabulous! One of the best which makes four great reasons to see the film.
The touches are here:
the suspenseful off screen murder, camera angles, a cool, classy leading lady & let's not forget the obligatory train scene. A typical Hitchcock psychological thriller. This time, literally. Salvadore Dali was brought in for some surealistic dream sequences. Ingrid Bergman is the beautiful shrink Dr. Peterson. Gregory Peck arrives as her new boss, Dr. Anthony Edwards. Or is he? The real Dr. Edwards has been killed & Peck has assumed his identity. He thinks he may be the killer. One problem. He has amnesia. But Dr. Peterson, up to this time, an ice princess has warmed to Peck & doesn't believe he could have done it. She has fallen in love with him & they spend the rest of the movie trying prove his innocence. It's easy to figure out who the murderer but it's a well done, entertaining movie in any case. I saw this movie only once & don't have a copy. I missed Hictcock's cameo. Any help?
About Spellbound detail
- Amazon Sales Rank: #949 in DVD
- Released on: 2008-10-14
- Rating: NR (Not Rated)
- Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
- Formats: Black & White, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Restored, Subtitled, NTSC
- Original language: English
- Subtitled in: English
- Number of discs: 1
- Running time: 111 minutes
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