Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) co-starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck is a light psychological mystery. Seen by this writer for the first time in nitrate at a screening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood during the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival, this 1945 movie is not director Hitchcock’s best work. Spellbound is nevertheless thoughtful and interesting. With Peck as the handsome but offbeat new head of a mental health center and cigarette holder-smoking Bergman as the lady doctor with whom he falls in love at first sight, Spellbound is, as TCM’s hostess properly introduced it, more than a tad preposterous.
Seeded into this psycho-drama, which also features Norman Lloyd and a capable cast as pseudo-sane, possibly malicious or predatory and mentally unstable doctors and patients, is “a lesson in how to accept reality”. As soon as Peck’s doctor appears on scene as the new chief and author of a scholarly work titled “The Labyrinth of the Guilt Complex”, with frigid Bergman coming undone at the sight of him, it’s clear that Spellbound aims to surprise while spinning into several subplots.
Is Spellbound spellbinding? Not completely, as Peck’s and Bergman’s doctors bond over a common interest in athletics and he subsequently goes bonkers over kidney-shaped designs on a napkin (or is it the stripes?) and she gets excited over the prospect of tending to the helpless male. Spellbound is more fun for picking up clues than it is binding, even as murder comes into play and Peck dashes off to the Empire Hotel.
Subplots come and go. Some converge, some do not, and some stagnate for no apparent plot point or purpose than amusement. There’s the matter of toying with the then-radical notion of a woman in public alone. Or is Hitchcock simply exploring the idea of being suspicious of an attractive woman alone? This is done as he dramatizes harassment of an attractive, professional woman who’s alone.
In any case, Bergman’s competent doctor is subdued in pursuing the handsome, possibly helpless, possibly unhinged, man in room 3033 and this alone raises thought-provoking, or at least entertaining, questions, especially in the context of the year 1945. When someone makes a declaration which begins with “I want…”, it earns the audience attention, even if it hardly amounts to an effective surprise.
Mixed with detectives on the trail, a glass of milk, a dubious claim that “the mind isn’t everything”, and a train to Rochester, all with Hitchcock’s usual visual flourish, Spellbound gets ahead of itself. Murder, of course, is solved in due course, though don’t expect a fully logical, let alone plausible, explanation. That it comes with the additional bit of wisdom that there’s “lots of happiness in working hard” makes Spellbound more enjoyable than bewitching.
Today, I’ve added to the site archives my first review of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It’s an analysis which posted earlier this year for the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival, where I had the pleasure to see the master’s 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much on nitrate at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Read my review of this interesting movie and thoughts on its screening, which was introduced by Martin Scorsese (Hugo, The Departed, New York, New York) here. I plan to add more classic film reviews this year.
Though I review movies only informally and occasionally for the blog, I plan to continue. I’m focussing on classic movie analysis, however, based on pictures I’ve seen on the big screen, such as The Man Who Knew Too Much. I enjoyed seeing an Alfred Hitchcock movie on the silver screen, of course, and I’d like to see more of his work and write more, new reviews and analyses, so let me know if you have one or two in mind you’d like me to review. As of now, my favorite Hithcock movie is 1954’s Rear Window, so I may write about this movie next. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in Hitchcock, who is with Howard Hawks and Lasse Hallstrom among my top favorite film directors, I did see and review a 2012 biographical movie about the master of suspense, which is simply titled Hitchcock, co-starring Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins. Read the review here. I’ve seen most of Hitchcock’s movies and many of the TV episodes. I’m also reading Hitchcock/Truffaut (I’ve seen the recent documentary, too).
I first started to take Hitchcock’s work seriously as a student of film during the 1990s while attending Professor Shoshana Milgram’s lectures and classes in Southern California and at several summer OCONs. Her work in film and literature is always deep, serious and thought-provoking. Dr. Milgram really encourages students to see his movies and think about them and she stirred me to appreciate why seeing a movie more than once can be a rich reward for the rational mind. I’ve written my reviews to be read both before and after the reader has seen the movie ever since. Today is Hitchcock’s birthday, so it strikes me as the best day to post my first review of a Hitchcock film to the backlog. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he remade with superior results in 1956, is a solid, suspenseful thriller. I saw the picture at a screening in Sid Grauman’s recently renovated movie theater on Hollywood Boulevard, The Egyptian, on a nitrate print owned by David O. Selznick and featured at TCM’s Classic Film Festival. The British movie was introduced by director Martin Scorsese (Silence, Raging Bull, The Aviator).
A couple vacationing in Switzerland with their only child becomes ensnared in an intriguing assassination plot that leads to their daughter being kidnapped, a frantic attempt to get her back from the evil kidnappers in a London church and a volatile climax in which mother, father and daughter are potentially caught in the crossfire in a shootout between police and assassins. The black and white, 75-minute movie begins with a thrilling and elegant series of scenes in the Swiss Alps, establishing the efficacy of the mother (Edna Best), moving to police headquarters, a dentist’s office in London and a church cult in working class London where the freakish leader Abbott (Germany’s Peter Lorre in his first English-speaking role since fleeing National Socialism) and his freakish female companion Agnes (Cicely Oates) lure and confront the heroic father (Leslie Banks, shining in the role). A tense scene at the Royal Albert Hall uses the same cymbal-themed music as the 1956 remake with Doris Day and James Stewart.
The Man Who Knew Too Much is a brisk, lucid and economic exercise in filmmaking and it is involving but at times it does feel like an exercise. By the time Best’s mother character does her mea culpa for having castigated the wayward daughter (Nova Pilbeam, the last surviving cast member until she died last summer) early in the movie, the gunfight has gone on too long and at the expense of the drama. The motherhood theme is nonetheless powerful, though her character emotionally pitches too soon at Albert Hall without a properly threaded and balanced exposition. Best aces the pivotal street scene, which elicited triumphant applause during the screening at the Egyptian, and Banks, too, in a chair-smashing scene at the Tabernacle of the Sun, is breathtaking. The most absorbing psychological progression, however, occurs between Agnes and Abbott during the showdown with London police.
This takes place after curiously engaging set-up scenes at church, where Banks’s father and Lorre’s child-robber go back and forth over the mind becoming blank, courtesy of a character named Clive (Hugh Wakefield) who functions here as a light comic relief. Clive, too, develops the plot-theme of redemption for authority after his passionate attempts to convince policemen are laughed off and rejected—he is dismissed as a kook or conspiracy theorist, as how could harm come to a child in church?—until police must face the deadly consequences of their denial.
Indeed, given how The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) ends, it plays as a serious reproach of London police, who literally miss the mark when it matters. Trust and count on no one (especially the government), both Hitchcock movie versions really say, above your own reasoning mind, judgment and skill. I prefer his Americanized 1956 version, which I agree with the master of suspense is the better movie. But the original is also extremely good.
Author’s Note
Thank you for your interest in my writing.
I write fiction and non-fiction. Read my blog at left for informal posts on news, ideas and the culture. I am available for contracting, so if you're interested, please start here.
I welcome feedback. To let me know your thoughts, please feel free to contact me.
Spellbound is nevertheless thoughtful and interesting. With Peck as the handsome but offbeat new head of a mental health center and cigarette holder-smoking Bergman as the lady doctor with whom he falls in love at first sight, Spellbound is, as TCM’s hostess properly introduced it, more than a tad preposterous.
Though I review movies only informally and occasionally for the blog, I plan to continue. I’m focussing on classic movie analysis, however, based on pictures I’ve seen on the big screen, such as