Spellbound - Wellington Film Society

Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1945, 111 mins PG

The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results. Gregory Peck’s taciturn performance as the amnesiac hero is a problem, though you can see the qualities in Peck that intrigued his director (both here and in The Paradine Case): his monumental self-control, self-consciousness, and basic insecurity. His performance is a dry run for Tippi Hedren’s remarkable work in Marnie. With Ingrid Bergman, ironically employed as an icon of glowing health, and Leo G. Carroll. - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader