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Spellbound (1945 film)
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Wikipedia article
{{Infobox film
| name = Spellbound
| image = Spellbound original.jpg
| alt =
| caption = Theatrical release poster
| director = Alfred Hitchcock
| producer = David O. Selznick
| screenplay =
| based_on =
| starring =
| music = Mikls Rzsa
| cinematography = George Barnes
| editing = Hal C. Kern
| studio = Selznick International Pictures
Vanguard Films
| distributor = United Artists
| released =
| runtime = 111 minutes
| country = United States
| budget = US$1.5 million
| gross = US$6.4 million
}}
'Spellbound' is a 1945 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, and Michael Chekhov. It follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer. The film is based on the 1927 novel 'The House of Dr. Edwardes' by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer.
Filming of 'Spellbound' took place in the summer of 1944 in Vermont, Utah, and Los Angeles. 'Spellbound' was released theatrically in New York City on Halloween 1945, after which its U.S. release expanded on December 28, 1945. The film received favorable reviews from critics and was a major box-office success, grossing $6.4 million in the United States, and breaking ticket sales records in London. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director, and won in the category of Best Original Score.
Plot
Dr. Constance Petersen is a psychoanalyst at Green Manors, a therapeutic community mental hospital in Vermont. She is perceived by the other doctors as detached and emotionless. The director of the hospital, Dr. Murchison, is being forced into retirement shortly after returning from an absence due to nervous exhaustion. His replacement is Dr. Anthony Edwardes, who turns out to be surprisingly young. Petersen is immediately smitten with Edwardes.
They fall in love. One day, while they are kissing, however, Petersen notices that this Edwardes has a peculiar phobia about sets of parallel lines against a white background. She compares Edwardes' signature on a letter to her with an autographed copy of one of his books, realizing that they do not match and he is an impostor. He confides to her that he has killed the real Edwardes and taken his place. He suffers from amnesia and does not know who he really is: he appears to be suffering a Dissociative fugue. Petersen believes he is innocent and that he is suffering from a guilt complex. He disappears overnight, leaving a note for her. At the same time, it becomes public knowledge that the supposed Edwardes is an impostor, and that the real Edwardes is missing and may have been killed.
Petersen manages to track him down to a New York City hotel, where he is living under the pseudonym John Brown. Despite his insistence for her to leave, Petersen insists on psychoanalyzing him to break through his amnesia and uncover his former memories. Pursued by the police through Grand Central Terminal, the two travel by train to Rochester, New York, where they stay with Dr. Alexander Brulov, Petersen's former mentor.
The two doctors analyze a dream that Brown had. He is playing cards in a mysterious club when a scantily-clad woman resembling Petersen starts kissing everybody there. His card partner, an older man, is accused of cheating and threatened by the club's masked proprietor. The scene changes to the older man standing on the precipice of a sloped roof; he falls off, and the proprietor is found to be standing behind a chimney and dropping a wheel he held in his hands. Brown's dream concludes with him being chased down a hill by a great pair of wings.
Petersen and Brulov conclude that Brown's phobia of dark lines on white is based on ski tracks in the snow, the older man in his dream is the real Edwardes, and he met his demise in a skiing accident. They use the detail of the wings to deduce that it must have been the Gabriel Valley ski lodge. Brown and Petersen travel there, planning on recreating the circumstances of Edwardes' death, despite fears that Brown may impulsively kill again in the same situation if he really were Edwardes' murderer.
As they go down the slope, Brown remembers details of his former life: he has a guilt complex, rooted in a childhood accident where he killed his brother by knocking him onto a spiked fence. He also recalls that Edwardes fell off the cliff in front of them, and is able to stop himself and Petersen just in time. He recounts his memories to Petersen back in the ski lodge, most notably that his real name is John Ballantyne. The police arrive, reveal that they found Edwardes' body where Ballantyne claimed it would be, but with a bullet wound in his back. Ballantyne is arrested, tried, and convicted of murder.
A heartbroken Petersen returns to her position at the hospital, where Murchison is once again the director. Murchison lets slip that he knew Edwardes slightly and did not like him, contradicting his earlier statement that they had never met. This inspires Petersen to re-examine her notes of Ballantyne's dream: the masked proprietor represents Murchison, the wheel represents a revolver, and Murchison therefore murdered Edwardes and left the gun on the ski slope.
Petersen confronts Murchison in his office to prove her hunch; she relates Ballantyne's dream to Murchison, getting him to admit that the masked proprietor likely represents himself. She presents her accusation, and Murchison replies that she got every detail right but one: he still has the revolver, and draws it on her. Petersen reasons with Murchison as she walks out of his office to phone the police, pointing out that while he could plead insanity and get a lesser charge for Edwardes' murder, shooting her would guarantee his execution. She leaves the office, and Murchison turns the gun on himself.
The final scene shows Petersen and Ballantyne, now married, receiving well-wishes from Dr. Brulov before departing on their honeymoon at Grand Central Terminal.
Cast
Production
Development
'Spellbound' was made over contract disagreements between Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick. Hitchcock's contract with Selznick began in March 1939, but only resulted in three films: 'Spellbound', 'Rebecca' (1940) and 'The Paradine Case' (1947). ('Notorious' was sold to RKO in mid-production.) Selznick had wanted Hitchcock to make a film based upon Selznick's own positive experience with psychoanalysis; Selznick, at Hitchcock's suggestion, purchased the rights to the 1927 novel 'The House of Dr. Edwardes' by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer (who had co-written it under the pseudonym Francis Beeding), for approximately $40,000.In December 1943, Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, began working on a treatment of the novel, and consulted prominent British psychologists and psychoanalysts so as to accurately represent the psychological elements of the story. However, the following month, in January 1944, Hitchcock hired Angus MacPhail, with whom he had collaborated on several war-related short films, to co-author the treatment. MacPhail was ultimately given the adaptation credit, and the extent to which Reville was involved in the final product is unknown. Following the completion of the treatment, screenwriter Ben Hecht began writing the screenplay.
Between May and July 1944, Selznick submitted numerous drafts of Hecht's screenplay for approval from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who objected to various words and phrases in it, including "sex menace," "frustrations," "libido," and "tomcat." This resulted in some alterations in the screenplay, including the removal of most of a character named Mary Carmichael, a violent nymphomaniac at Green Manors. However, the suicide of Dr. Murchison in the screenplaywhich typically violated the MPAA's rules against depicting suicidewas allowed to remain, as it was reasoned by Selznick that the character was clearly "of unsound mind," rendering him an exception.
Casting
Selznick originally wanted Joseph Cotten, Dorothy McGuire, and Paul Lukas to play the roles ultimately portrayed by Peck, Bergman, and Chekhov, respectively. Greta Garbo was considered for the role of Dr. Constance Petersen. Hitchcock wanted Joseph Cotten to portray Dr. Murchison. Selznick also wanted Jennifer Jones to portray Dr. Petersen but Hitchcock objected.Filming
Selznick brought in his own therapist, May Romm, MD, to serve as a technical advisor on the production. Dr. Romm and Hitchcock clashed frequently.Further contention was caused by the hiring of surrealist artist Salvador Dal to conceive certain scenes in the film's key dream sequence. However, the sequence conceived and designed by Dal and Hitchcock, once translated to film, proved to be too lengthy and complicated for Selznick, so the vast majority of what had been filmed ultimately was edited out. Two minutes of the dream sequence appear in the final film, but according to Ingrid Bergman, the original had been twenty minutes long. The cut footage apparently is now considered lost footage, although some production stills have survived in the Selznick archives. Eventually, Selznick hired William Cameron Menzies, who had worked on 'Gone With the Wind', to oversee the set designs and direct the sequence. Hitchcock himself had very little to do with its actual filming.
Both Bergman and Peck were married to others at the time of production—Bergman to Petter Aron Lindstrm, and Peck to Greta Kukkonen—but they had a brief affair during filming. Their secret relationship became public knowledge when Peck confessed to Brad Darrach of 'People' in an interview in 1987, five years after Bergman's death. "All I can say is that I had a fiery kinda love for her, and I think thats where I ought to stop I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work."
Hitchcock's cameo appearance in the film occurs approximately at the forty-minute mark, when he can be seen exiting an elevator at the Empire State Hotel, carrying a violin case and smoking a cigarette. The trailer for 'Spellbound's original theatrical release in America made a great deal of fuss over this cameo of Hitchcock's, showing the footage twice and even freeze-framing Hitchcock's brief appearance while a breathless narrator informs us that this ordinary-looking man is, in fact, Hitchcock himself.
'Spellbound' was shot in black and white, except for two frames of bright red at the conclusion, when Dr. Murchison's gun is fired into the camera. This detail was deleted in most 16mm and video formats but was restored for the film's DVD release and airings on Turner Classic Movies.
Parts of the film were shot in Alta, Utah at the Alta Lodge and Wasatch Ranch. The film's picnic sequence between Peck and Bergmans' characters was filmed at the Cooper Ranch in Northridge, Los Angeles, while other sequencessuch as the train depot scenewere filmed on the Universal Studios lot.
Music
The film features an orchestral score by Mikls Rzsa that pioneered the use of the theremin, performed by Dr. Samuel Hoffmann. Selznick originally wanted Bernard Herrmann, but when Herrmann became unavailable, Rzsa was hired and eventually won the Oscar for his score. Although Rzsa considered 'Spellbound' to contain some of his best work, he said "Alfred Hitchcock didn't like the music said it got in the way of his direction. I haven't seen him since." During the film's protracted post-production, considerable disagreement arose about the music, exacerbated by a lack of communication between producer, director, and composer. Rzsa had scored another film, 'The Lost Weekend', before 'Spellbound' was released and had used the theremin in that score as well. This led to allegations that he had recycled music from Selznick's film in the Paramount production. Meanwhile, Selznick's assistant tampered with the 'Spellbound' scoring by replacing some of Rzsa's material with earlier music by Franz Waxman and Roy Webb. The tangled history of the scoring process has been explored by Jack Sullivan ('Hitchcock's Music', 2006) and especially Nathan Platte ('Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood', 2018), both of which qualify and sometimes contradict the early accounts of the participants.Rzsa's music achieved great popularity outside the film. Selznick's innovative use of promotional recordings for radio broadcast made the themes familiar and eventually inspired Rzsa to prepare a full-scale 'Spellbound Concerto' for piano, theremin, and orchestra. This work became a popular staple in the movie concerto genre and has received multiple recordings. Intrada Records made the first recording of the film's complete score with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. This album also included music not heard in the finished film.
Production credits
The production credits on the film were as follows:* Director Alfred Hitchcock
* Producer David O. Selznick
* Writing Ben Hecht (screenplay), Angus MacPhail (adaptation)
* Cinematography George Barnes (director of photography)
* Music Mikls Rzsa
* Art direction James Basevi (art director), John Ewing (associate art director), Emile Kuri (interior decoration)
* Film editing Hal C. Kern (supervising film editor), William H. Ziegler (associate film editor)
* Production assistant Barbara Keon
* Special effects Jack Cosgrove special effects
* Assistant director Lowell J. Farrell
* Sound Richard DeWeese (recorder)
* Design of dream sequence Salvador Dal
* Psychiatric advisor May E. Romm, M.D.
Release
Box office
'Spellbound' opened theatrically in New York City on Halloween 1945, and the following week in Los Angeles, on November 8, 1945. It was subsequently given a wide release in the United States on December 28, 1945. It earned rentals of $4,975,000 in North America."All-Time Top Grossers", 'Variety', 8 January 1964 p 69[https://archive.org/stream/variety165-1947-01#page/n54/mode/1up "60 Top Grossers of 1946", 'Variety' 8 January 1947 p8]Upon the film's British release, it broke every box office record in London, in both famous theaters, Pavilion and Tivoli Strand, for a single day, week, month, holiday and Sundays.
Critical response
'Newsweek's' review evaluated the film as "a superior and suspenseful melodrama;" Bosley Crowther of 'The New York Times' wrote that the story was "a rather obvious and often-told tale ... but the manner and quality of its telling is extraordinarily fine ... the firm texture of the narration, the flow of continuity and dialogue, the shock of the unexpected, the scope of imageall are happily here." 'Variety' wrote that Bergman gave a "beautiful characterization" and that Peck "handles the suspense scenes with great skill and has one of his finest screen roles to date." 'Harrison's Reports' wrote: "Very good! ... The performances of the entire cast are superior, and throughout the action an overtone of suspense and terror, tinged with touches of deep human interest and appealing romance, is sustained." John McCarten of 'The New Yorker' wrote that "when the film stops trying to be esoteric and abandons arcane mumbling for good, rousing melodrama, it moves along in the manner to which Hitchcock has accustomed us ... Fortunately, the English expert hasn't forgotten any of his tricks. He still has a nice regard for supplementary characters, and he uses everything from train whistles to grand orchestral crescendos to maintain excitement at a shrill pitch ... All in all, you'd better see this one."'Spellbound' placed fifth on 'Film Daily's annual poll of 559 critics across the United States naming the best films of the year.
Rotten Tomatoes rates the film 85% fresh, based on 40 reviews. Its critical consensus says: 'Spellbound'
On September 28, 2018, Jake Wilson of The Age put 'Spellbound' on his top five list, observing: Today this seems above all a forward-thinking portrait of a woman battling for authority in a man's world.
Accolades
Home media
In 1999, Anchor Bay Entertainment released 'Spellbound' for the first time on DVD. The Criterion Collection subsequently issued a DVD release in 2002. In 2012, MGM Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray.Radio adaptations
'Spellbound' was performed as a one-hour radio adaptation on 'Lux Radio Theatre' on March 8, 1948. On January 25, 1951 'Screen Directors Playhouse' also did a one-hour adaptation. Both versions starred Joseph Cotten.Legacy
Rzsa's score inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ7ICPKcqJc Jerry Goldsmith interview] on YouTube
See also
* Dissociative amnesia
* List of American films of 1945
* Mental illness in films
References
Sources
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