SPELLBOUND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 383, 25 October 1946, Page 32

SPELLBOUND

(Selznick-United Artists)

FTER four weeks of Shakespearian splendours, Spellbound replaces Henry V. in Wellington; and now, instead of Harry, we get a little touch of Hitchcock in the

night. But only a feeble, diffident touch, not the bold, exciting pressure to which we are accustomed. For Hitchcock is, I think, much less at ease in the new psychological atmosphere of the cinema than in the old-fashioned world of crime melodrama where murders are solved by the comparatively simple process of -deduction from clues, and not by the analysis of Freudian dream-symbols, Spellbound is, or should be, the psychological film to end all such. It is big and impressive; it. has Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck as stars and an imposing supporting cast; the script was written by Ben Hecht; Salvador Dali collaborated on the dream sequence; and the credit titles list a certain May E. Romm as special psychiatric adviser. In response to this array of talent, the public ate practically trampling one another under foot to get to the box-office. And the entertainment certainly has its diverting and exciting moments-but it nevertheless remains a piece of pretentious hooey. z Thanks to the Hollywood build-up (beginning, I think, with Lady in the Dark) psychiatry must by now be just. about the most profitable of all the professions in the U.S.A. There are, -it would seem (to judge by a foreword to this new film), few things which it cannot do, few problems which will not yield a solution when the subconscious mind is probed. Yet in spite of all the learned expositions which come from the soundtrack in the course of the story as Dr. Ingrid Bergman battles for the love, the, liberty, and the sanity of a patient who is on the brink of a breakdown because. of a greatly-enlarged guilt-complex, I am afraid that Spellbound succeeds merely in giving me the impression that psychiatry itself is a science which teeters on the verge of phoniness; and that Alfred Hitchcock has here unhitched it and pushed it right over. oe * * O. we are landed ‘smack into an improbable tale in which the familiar Hitchcock formula of the man-hunt is complicated but not obscured by the fact that most of the action takes place in a large and expensive, Psychiatric Institute, where Miss Bergman wears spectacles and pretends to herself and other members of the staff that she is pure infellect and quite uninterested in love, until Mr. Peck wanders in, posing as the new Director of the Institute but really an amnesiac obsessed by the belief that he is a murderer. Whereupon Miss Bergman promptly removes her spectacles and succumbs to her latent womanly instincts, and the two of them keep just one pace ahead of the police while she goes to work on Mr. Peck’s subconscious to discover why he faints at the sight of fork-marks on the tablecloth and

stripes on a dressing-gown and wanders round at night with a razor in his) hand. 3k bs * HIS fantastic-rigmarole picks up’ con3 siderably in interest and » » Suspense when it is revealed’ that the. missing Director really was murdered. by. someébody, and when ‘Salvador Dali lends his surrealist aid’ to all the other’ parapher-. nalia of psychiatry by designing a nightTaare sequence in which eyes hang, suspended. like barrage-balloons over a dream landscape, wheels resemble. limp. pancakes,’ and tables have human legs. But too often the camera-tricks*are there simply for the sake of trickery,.and only occasionally does the authentic Hitchcock techniqué (as in the finale of the revolver close-up) survive the pseudoscientific hocus-pocus. However, as the foreword rather naively assures us, "the fault is not in our stars." This would appear to exonerate Miss Bergman and Mr. Peck, who I suppose do act as well as could bé expected in the circumstances. But if'the fault is not in our: stars, it must be in our difector, or in thé script-writer, or even possibly May E. Romm, Or perhaps thé foreword is right after all, and it is "in ourselves."» There’ is certainly a fault somewhere.