Spellbound (1945 film)

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Spellbound
Theatrical release poster
Directed byAlfred Hitchcock
Screenplay byBen Hecht
Adaptation byAngus MacPhail
Based on
Hilary Saint George Saunders and Francis Beeding
Produced byDavid O. Selznick
Starring
CinematographyGeorge Barnes
Edited byHal C. Kern
Music byMiklós Rózsa
Production
companies
Distributed byUnited Artists
Release dates
  • October 31, 1945 (1945-10-31) (New York City)
  • December 28, 1945 (1945-12-28) (United States)[1]
Running time
111 minutes[2]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
BudgetUS$1.5 million[3][4]
Box officeUS$6.4 million[5]
A still from Spellbound

Spellbound is a 1945 American

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

mental hospital in Vermont
, accused by an unsuccessful suitor colleague of being icy and unemotional. The hospital's director, Dr. Murchison, is forced into retirement shortly after returning from an absence due to nervous exhaustion. His replacement, Dr. Anthony Edwardes, turns out to be surprisingly young. Uncharacteristically, Petersen is immediately smitten with Edwardes, who returns her feelings.

While kissing him, Petersen notices that Edwardes has a peculiar phobia about sets of parallel lines against a white background, displayed on several occasions. She compares his signature with an autographed copy of one of his books, realizing when they do not match that he is an impostor. He confides to her that he has killed the real Edwardes, who was treating him, and taken his place. Suffering from amnesia, he does not know who he really is, but they deduce that he is a doctor when he displays medical knowledge. Petersen believes he is an innocent man with a guilt complex. Overnight, he disappears. Edwardes' assistant arrives and discloses that the Edwardes who spoke to her on the phone is an impostor, and that the real Edwardes is ominously missing.

Petersen tracks the impostor to a New York City hotel, where he is living under the pseudonym "John Brown". Despite his insistence that she leave, she convinces him that psychoanalysis can recover his memories. The two travel to Rochester, New York, and stay with Dr. Alexander Brulov, Petersen's former mentor and friend.

The two psychoanalysts interpret a dream that "Brown" describes. 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 and falling off. The proprietor is found to be standing behind a chimney and dropping a wheel he held in his hand. "Brown's" dream concludes with him chased down a hill by a great pair of wings.

"Brown's" phobia of dark lines on white represents ski tracks in the snow, and the older man in his dream is the real Edwardes, who died in a skiing accident. The detail of the wings they deduce to represent Gabriel Valley ski lodge. "Brown" and Petersen travel there to recreate the circumstances of Edwardes' death. However, "Brown" fears that, if he really was Edwardes' murderer, he may impulsively kill again in the same situation.

As they ski down the slope, "Brown" remembers details of his former life: he has a guilt complex, rooted in a childhood accident where he accidentally killed his brother by sliding down a roof and knocking him onto a spiked fence. He also recognizes the cliff where Edwardes fell off, and then "Brown" recalls his own real name: John Ballantyne. Petersen and Ballantyne later meet with the police, who find Edwardes' body with Ballantyne's directions. However, the corpse has a bullet wound in his back. Ballantyne is arrested, tried, and convicted of murder.

Heartbroken, Petersen returns to Green Manors. Murchison, once again the director, lets slip that he knew Edwardes slightly and disliked 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 and the wheel represents a revolver. Murchison therefore murdered Edwardes and left the gun on the ski slope.

Confronting Murchison to prove her hunch, Petersen gets him to admit that the man in the dream 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. Calmly, Petersen points out that while he could plead insanity and get a lesser charge for Edwardes' murder, shooting her in cold blood would guarantee his execution. With the gun still pointed at her, she leaves the office to phone the police, before Murchison turns the gun and shoots himself.

Petersen and Ballantyne, now married, receive well-wishes from Dr. Brulov before departing on their honeymoon at Grand Central Terminal.

Cast

Production

Development

Spellbound was made over contract disagreements between

Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer (who had co-written it under the pseudonym Francis Beeding), for approximately $40,000.[6]

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.[6] 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.[6] MacPhail was ultimately given the adaptation credit, and the extent to which Reville was involved in the final product is unknown.[6] Following the completion of the treatment, screenwriter Ben Hecht began writing the screenplay.[6]

Between May and July 1944, Selznick submitted numerous drafts of Hecht's screenplay for approval from the

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which objected to various words and phrases in it, including "sex menace," "frustrations," "libido," and "tomcat."[6] 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.[6] However, the suicide of Dr. Murchison in the screenplay—which typically violated the MPAA's rules against depicting suicide—was allowed to remain, as it was reasoned by Selznick that the character was clearly "of unsound mind," rendering him an exception.[6]

Casting

A black and white photograph of a woman, left, and a man, right, hold their arms around each other
Bergman and Peck in a still from the film

Selznick originally wanted Joseph Cotten, Dorothy McGuire, and Paul Lukas to play the roles ultimately portrayed by Peck, Bergman, and Chekhov, respectively.[7][8] Greta Garbo was considered for the role of Dr. Constance Petersen.[8] Hitchcock wanted Joseph Cotten to portray Dr. Murchison.[9] Selznick also wanted Jennifer Jones to portray Dr. Petersen but Hitchcock objected.[10][11]

Filming

Selznick brought in his own therapist, May Romm, MD, to serve as a technical advisor on the production.[8] Dr. Romm and Hitchcock clashed frequently.[8]

Further contention was caused by the hiring of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to conceive certain scenes in the film's key dream sequence. However, the sequence conceived and designed by Dalí 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.[12] 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.[12]

Both Bergman and Peck were married to others at the time of production—Bergman to Petter Aron Lindström, and Peck to Greta Kukkonen—but they had a brief affair during filming.[13] 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 that's where I ought to stop... I was young. She was young. We were involved for weeks in close and intense work."[14][15]

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 highlighted this cameo of Hitchcock's, showing the footage twice and even freeze-framing Hitchcock's brief appearance while a narrator points out that the ordinary-looking man in the footage is the director.[16]

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.[17] The film's picnic sequence between Peck and Bergmans' characters was filmed at the Cooper Ranch in Northridge, Los Angeles, while other sequences—such as the train depot scene—were filmed on the Universal Studios lot.[6]

Music

The film features an orchestral score by

Dr. Samuel Hoffmann. Selznick originally wanted Bernard Herrmann, but when Herrmann became unavailable, Rózsa was hired and eventually won the Oscar for his score.[12] Although Rózsa 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."[18] In his autobiography, Rózsa wrote that he was saddened that Hitchcock had not congratulated him, or even attempted to contact him, for winning an Oscar for his film's score.[19]

During the film's protracted post-production, considerable disagreement arose about the music, exacerbated by a lack of communication between producer, director, and composer. Rózsa 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 Rózsa'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.

Rózsa'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 Rózsa 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.[20]

Intrada Records album
No.TitleLength
1."Main Title; Foreword"3:13
2."Green Manors"0:51
3."First Meeting"2:11
4."The Picnic"2:01
5."The Awakening; Love Scene; The Dressing Gown; The Imposter – Parts 1 & 2; The Cigarette Case"16:49
6."The Letter"0:30
7."The Empire Hotel"1:22
8."The Burned Hand – Parts 1 & 2"2:29
9."The Penn Station"2:44
10."Railway Carriage"1:16
11."Honeymoon at Brulov's; The White Coverlet; The Razor – Parts 1 & 2; Constance Is Afraid"10:03
12."Constance and Brulov – Parts 1 & 2"4:15
13."Gambling Dream; Mad Proprietors Dream; Roof-Top Dreams"2:37
14."Dream Interpretation – Parts 1 & 2; The Decision"6:10
15."Train to Gabriel Valley"1:23
16."Ski Run; Mountain Lodge"5:51
17."Defeat"3:15
18."Contance's Discovery"2:04
19."The Revolver"3:05
20."The End"0:59
21."End Title – Short"0:24

Production credits

The production credits on the film were as follows:

Release

Poster for Spellbound

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.[21] It earned rentals of $4,975,000 in North America.[22][23]

Upon the film's British release, it broke every box office record in London, in both famous theaters,

Tivoli Strand, for a single day, week, month, holiday and Sundays.[24]

Home media

In 1999, Anchor Bay Entertainment released Spellbound for the first time on DVD.[25] The Criterion Collection subsequently issued a DVD release in 2002.[26] In 2012, MGM Home Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray.[27]

Radio adaptations

Spellbound was performed as a one-hour radio adaptation on Lux Radio Theatre on March 8, 1948.[28] On January 25, 1951 Screen Directors Playhouse also did a one-hour adaptation.[29] Both versions starred Joseph Cotten.

Critical response

Newsweek's review evaluated the film as "a superior and suspenseful melodrama;"

The Nation in 1945, critic James Agee: "Alfred Hitchcock's surprisingly disappointing thriller about psychoanalysis, is worth seeing, but hardly more...I felt that the makers of the film had succeeded in using practically none of the movie possibilities of a psychoanalytic story, even those of the simplest melodrama; and that an elaborate, none-too-interesting murder mystery, though stoutly moored to the unconscious, merely cheapened and got in the way of any possible psychological interest...As for the dream designed by Salvador Dali, it is...frankly irrelevant to dream reality, and so to criticism for its lack of reality in that direct sense... " [35]

Spellbound placed fifth on

Film Daily's annual poll of 559 critics across the United States naming the best films of the year.[36]

Rotten Tomatoes rates the film 85% fresh, based on 40 reviews. Its critical consensus says: "Spellbound's exploration of the subconscious could have benefitted from more analysis, but Alfred Hitchcock's psychedelic flourishes elevate this heady thriller along with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck's star power".[37]

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."[38]

Accolades

Award Category Subject Result
Academy Awards Best Picture David O. Selznick Nominated
Best Director Alfred Hitchcock Nominated
Best Supporting Actor Michael Chekhov Nominated
Best Cinematography George Barnes Nominated
Best Original Score Miklós Rózsa Won
Best Visual Effects Jack Cosgrove Nominated[39]
NYFCC Award Best Actress Ingrid Bergman Won
Venice Film Festival Grand International Award Alfred Hitchcock Nominated

Legacy

Rózsa's score inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer.[40][41]

See also

References

  1. ^ Hanson 1999, p. 2293.
  2. ^ "SPELLBOUND (A)". British Board of Film Classification. January 30, 1946. Retrieved February 20, 2024.
  3. ^ "Indies $70,000,000 Pix Output". Variety. 3 November 1944. p. 3. Retrieved 26 July 2016.
  4. ^ Truffaut 1983, p. 169.
  5. ^ Thomson 1993, p. 445.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Spellbound". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Archived from the original on June 11, 2021.
  7. ^ Haney 2009, p. 116.
  8. ^ a b c d Lyttleton, Oliver (October 31, 2012). "5 Things You May Not Know About Alfred Hitchcock's 'Spellbound'". IndieWire. Retrieved September 18, 2016.
  9. ^ Millington & Freedman 1999, p. 25.
  10. ^ Green 2011, p. 224.
  11. ^ Fishgall 2002, p. 96.
  12. ^ a b c Spoto 1999, p. 277.
  13. ^ Haney 2009, p. 122.
  14. ^ Fishgall 2002, p. 98.
  15. ^ Darrach, Brad (June 15, 1987). "Gregory Peck". People. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  16. ^ "Spellbound (1945) - Hitchcock's cameo". Alfred Hitchcock Wiki. Retrieved 2024-02-20.
  17. ^ D'Arc 2010, p. 287.
  18. ^ "Miklós Rózsa – Biography". IMDb. Retrieved 2009-12-21.
  19. ISBN 978-0-8825-4683-4
    .
  20. ^ "Spellbound". Intrada Records. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  21. ^ Wijdicks 2020, p. 125.
  22. ^ "All-Time Top Grossers", Variety, 8 January 1964 p 69
  23. ^ "60 Top Grossers of 1946". Variety. January 8, 1947. p. 8. Retrieved January 3, 2025 – via Internet Archive.
  24. ^ "'Spellbound' Breaks Admission Records". The Miami News. June 30, 1946.
  25. ^ Pitman, Randy (January 14, 2003). "Spellbound; To Catch a Thief". Video Librarian. Archived from the original on September 6, 2021.
  26. Brown University Library. Archived
    from the original on September 6, 2021.
  27. ^ Kehr, David (February 12, 2012). "In Hitchcock's World of Fallible Mortals". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 27, 2019.
  28. ^ "Monday Selections". Toledo Blade. March 8, 1948. p. 4 (Peach Section). Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  29. ^ "USO Amateur Show to Have Fanciest Cast in History". Youngstown Vindicator. January 25, 1951. p. 31. Retrieved 2021-06-06.
  30. ^ McGilligan 2004, p. 379.
  31. ^ Crowther, Bosley (November 2, 1945). "Movie Review – Spellbound". The New York Times. Retrieved March 10, 2016.
  32. ^ "Film Reviews". Variety: 17. October 31, 1945.
  33. ^ ""Spellbound" with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck". Harrison's Reports. XXVIII (44): 175–176. November 3, 1945. Retrieved January 3, 2025.
  34. ^ McCarten, John (November 3, 1945). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker. pp. 69–70.
  35. ^ Agee, James - Agee on Film Vol.1 © 1958 by The James Agee Trust
  36. Film Daily
    : 1. January 6, 1947.
  37. ^ "Spellbound". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2022-09-02.
  38. ^ Wilson, Jake (2018-09-27). "Top five films: best of the big screen". The Age. Retrieved 2022-09-02.
  39. ^ 1946 Academy Award nominations and winners for films released in 1945 at Oscar.org
  40. ^ Miller, Frank. "Spellbound (1945) Pop Culture 101 – SPELLBOUND". Turner Classic Movies.
  41. ^ Jerry Goldsmith interview on YouTube.

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