Spellbound (1945)

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

We’ve been talking about spells this week — well, not the kinds that witches chant, but the original meaning of the word, which had to do with tidings, as in the excellent word gospel. So you might suppose that our choice for the Film of the Week is motivated just by the off chance that the word spell shows up in it: Spellbound. But there’s more to it than that.

Alfred Hitchcock, whose work we’ve featured here several times, most recently just a couple of weeks ago with The Man Who Knew Too Much, was fascinated with the psychology of guilt. What do you call somebody who never feels guilt? A sociopath, that’s what. For most of my life, I’ve heard from people in high places who try to say that we should not feel guilty about so many things. I’ll freely concede that people are often made to feel guilty about what is not their fault. But in general, we don’t like to face our wrongdoings; we make excuses; we’ll even turn them into virtues. Oh, other people’s sins stand out in crystal clarity, when they’re of the kind that we happen not to commit, because we don’t enjoy them or they don’t serve our purpose or we’re busy doing something else we shouldn’t. Speck, meet beam.

We tell stories about ourselves, too, and when there’s something we’d rather not face, if it’s something extreme, we try hard to forget it or to bury it. That’s one of the insights — he did have some, after all, despite the many things he got wrong — that Freud made known to the world, and whatever else we may think of it, it forms the foundation of Hitchcock’s film. A young man suffering amnesia (at our house, we jestingly call it “magnesia,” and wonder why they don’t have an over-the-counter remedy for it) shows up at a psychiatric hospital in Vermont to take charge of it. This young man (Gregory Peck) calls himself Dr. Edwardes, and he does know a lot about psychology, but we see pretty quickly that there’s something wrong with him, and in fact he’s an impostor. The real Edwardes is dead. Meanwhile, the woman doctor at the hospital, Dr. Petersen (Ingrid Bergman, nominated for an Oscar for her role), falling in love with the young man, suspects that there is something buried in his mind that needs to be unearthed. The film recounts that quest to find out, from wherever it is in his mind, what this man, whose real name is John Ballantine, has done or has seen. It is both a psychological probe and a mystery. Why does this man who does not know who he is feel guilty? What is the source of that feeling? Who actually is guilty of the death of Edwardes, if anyone?

Speaking of stories and guilt, there is nothing in all of literature as powerful as Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son, which we suppose is finished when the young man who has wasted half his father’s living comes home, partly because he is sorry and partly because he was starving, though maybe in us misfortune and guilt so grow together that we can hardly separate them out. But no, there’s the elder son in the field, working, the son who did not sin; and who is now in great spiritual peril, because he is ready to give himself up to anger, resentment, and hardness of heart. What that elder son does after his father has finished his plea, Jesus does not say. It is aimed right at the heart of every single one of us. The story convicts us before we know what has happened, before we can shut our ears or erect some other defense.

Spellbound assumes that the audience is grown up, and that they know what a man and a woman in love and traveling incognito might do. Yet Hitchcock preserves their innocence, and if you think that that’s only what Hollywood’s “Code” required, you’ve mistaken the director. The electricity between Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, at all costs, must not be short-circuited; the tension must be kept up. It is, besides, the only way Dr. Petersen can preserve any sense of objectivity. They flee to her old teacher and friend, a Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), who lives in upstate New York, not too far from where people go skiing in the Adirondacks in the winter, and he assists them, though he warns her that he will keep silent about the hero’s whereabouts for only a few days. He is afraid that her love for the young man is blinding her. We learn rather that it is enabling her to see what others do not. And by the way, as befits a week in which I’ve moved at least 2,000 pounds of snow, the ski slopes figure into the solution of the mystery, in a most dramatic way.

In my opinion, Ingrid Bergman was the greatest actress Hollywood ever knew. Whatever she does, she is worth watching: see her, with your whole family, playing the missionary Gladys Aylward in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Gregory Peck is excellent as always, and we get first-rate supporting performances from Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, and Norman Lloyd. Spellbound was nominated for quite a few Oscars; its biggest winner was Miklos Rozsa, for his score. The Hungarian Rosza was, you might say, the musical great-grandson of Franz Liszt: his mother, a concert pianist, studied under a couple of Liszt’s students. His father, too, was a promoter and an aficionado of Hungarian folk music. Meanwhile, a teenage boy saw Spellbound when it premiered in 1945, and was so inspired by Rozsa’s accomplishment, he decided that he too would grow up and write musical scores for films. That he did, and he became one of film’s most influential composers, nominated for the Oscar 18 times (winning once). If you’ve watched the movie Patton, or the very different movie Hoosiers, or the Star Trek films, or — believe it or not — if you’ve heard the theme to the old-home television show The Waltons, set not in outer space or the European fields of war but in the Appalachians of Virginia, you’ll know his work. He’s Jerry Goldsmith.

Our film today is available to watch on Internet Archive.

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