Spellbound

A rousing black melodrama and the first psychoanalytical film in the history of cinema. Analysis not filmed, but turned into a film form. Analyst and analysand, loving doctor and sick doctor, Ingrid Bergman (who begins to suspect that the new director of the asylum is a mentally ill murderer) and Gregory Peck (dark, tortured Apollo with a Modigliani face) take flight. Movement in the room. Then the journey back into the self, the search for the key to memory loss in the maw of the past. Crossing time on the wings of a dream sequence and in the cataracts of bursting memory images. Like all great Hitchcock films, Spellbound is divided into two parts by an imaginary suspense demarcation line. In the first, there is suspicion as to whether Peck is who he appears to be. In the second, the shadow of a doubt reigns as to whether he actually is who he shouldn't be. The result: a cornucopia of fear and hope. (H.T.)