Rent Spellbound (1945)

Film Blanc. - Spellbound review by Steve

There's the traditional hero of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller; the wrong man fleeing the law to clear his name. But the MacGuffin is an incident suppressed in the guilt complex of his psyche. It's among the first of the Freudian thrillers released after WWII. The authority of the subconsciousness became one of the Master's motifs.

Gregory Peck plays the doctor who must prove his innocence. When he and Ingrid Bergman (in her glasses and lab coat) appear as psychiatrists at the start of the film, they look so drop dead beautiful that it takes about 20 minutes to suspend disbelief. Rhonda Fleming maintains the glamour as a photogenic patient.

Made in peak period film noir, it is diverting to see a thriller which is preoccupied with whiteness. The frantic suspect reacts unpredictably to any memory of snow. There's a standard Hitchcock plot- adapted by Ben Hecht from a forgotten novel. It's the colour design with striking modernist touches which sets it apart.

The dream sequence featuring original artwork by Salvador Dali is crucial. But there are many startling and influential flourishes. When the camera tracks the disorientated suspect down a stairway and closes in on the cut throat razor in his hand, we could be watching '70s Italian Giallo. Realism isn't a priority, but this is still a stylish suspense classic.

Theremins and Trauma - Spellbound review by griggs

Stylish and suspenseful, Spellbound is a melodrama with more going on beneath the surface than many of its 1940s peers. Hitchcock brings a cool precision to what is, at heart, a psychological whodunnit—with added Freud and a dash of Dalí for flair. The story leans heavily on the romance between Ingrid Bergman’s steely psychiatrist and Gregory Peck’s dreamy amnesiac. While the film still grips, the psychology now feels more charmingly outdated than cutting-edge.

It treats psychoanalysis like a narrative scalpel—cutting cleanly through trauma, guilt, and repression to arrive at a single, tidy resolution. Dreams aren’t elusive riddles here; they’re literal puzzles, waiting for someone like Bergman to decode. Peck’s character, meanwhile, suffers from a textbook case of psychogenic amnesia—a plot device masquerading as a diagnosis, cured by a dose of therapy and romantic perseverance. It’s hardly realistic, but keeps the tension taut.

Bergman carries the film with quiet resolve, while Peck teeters between haunted and wooden depending on the moment. The real thrill, though, lies in the design—the eerie dream sequence with Dalí’s surrealist landscapes and giant eyeballs, the razor-edged shadows that echo Hitchcock’s thrillers, and Miklós Rózsa’s theremin-fuelled score, which wails like the inner workings of a nervous breakdown.

The final act ties things up a little too neatly, and the gender dynamics—progressive for the time—still settle into a familiar mould: woman as emotional caregiver, man as fragile genius. Still, there’s a strange comfort in the clarity with which everything resolves, and Hitchcock keeps a steady hand on the tone throughout.

Spellbound may not be peak Hitchcock, but it’s a striking blend of noir intrigue, glossy romance, and psychological spectacle—more elegant than it is accurate, and all the more watchable for it.