Erupting out of the wave of interest in psychotherapy following World War II, Hitchcock’s Spellbound is nearly a cornucopia of the director’s psychological obsessions. It is also an organum of the European director’s successful migration of his style and aesthetics into an American vocabulary while retaining a distinctly continental elegance and intelligence. Perhaps less well known or lauded than Saboteur (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) or Notorious (1946) from the same period, Spellbound has other charms that make it one of Hitchcock’s notable films of the era.

There is great precision in the crafting of the film. It was one of David O Selznick’s productions, and he was a constant mother hen to his staff of directors, players, and actors. In 1966, Hitchcock joked that he received one of Selznick’s famous memos upon his arrival (1940), and had only just finished reading it. With a crackerjack script by Ben Hecht based on John Palmer’s and Hilary St George Sanders’ novel The House of Dr Edwardes, the tale manipulates Hitchcock’s usually crafty heroes and heroines and the marvellous theme of the wrong man (or is he?). The plot hinges on a lost Doctor Edwardes (Gregory Peck), a character recruited to lead a troubled lunatic asylum. But Edwardes has his own strange compulsions eating away at him. Whenever Peck sees lines on anything, patterns in the sand, rumples in bed sheets, he begins to go bonkers.

But what makes Spellbound memorable? First there is the overwhelming presence of Ingrid Bergman who dominates the film and assures its success through her smart and canny performance. This is a rare Hitchcock film in which the major character is a woman, and in this instance she acts as detective, love interest, and potential victim. Aside from a pungent and engaging cameo from Rhonda Fleming as a psychotic vixen, Ingrid is the only female of consequence in the film.

This was Bergman’s first of three films with Hitchcock, and she is radiant in every scene. It is clear that Hitchcock was charmed by her, the camera caressing her in a way unseen until Hitchcock’s adulation of Grace Kelly permeated his films of the fifties. As in all his productions, Hitchcock had fun with his actors. He uses Bergman for several clever visual puns. In one scene Bergman sweeps into a room, drawing the attention of a band of middle-aged, bearded, Freudian psychiatrists. They all stand to attention. The visual joke is one of many throughout the film. Literally, Bergman brings them to an erection. One shares their admiration. She is hypnotic.

There was something brilliant in casting the earthy, often spiritual, and clearly intuitive Bergman as an intellectual psychiatrist/doctor afraid of deep emotional and sexual commitment to a man. She is impressively varied in each scene. First waving her proud shoulders, than showing her pouty face. When she meets Peck she changes immediately. She explores her repressed wild school girl, almost like a child trying to play an adult. During the adorable picnic scene, she is asked whether she would like a sandwich: Liverwurst or ham? Has anyone ever said the word ‘liverwurst’ with such vigour and raw sexuality?! The glory of Ingrid was that she could make love to any line. In another scene she meets her patient / paramour Gregory Peck in a hotel room, and they carnally embrace in front of a Georgia O’Keefe-inspired flower, suggesting the wildly sexual elements of O’Keefe’s desert flora. Bergman ‘opens up’ to Peck in one of the most impassioned scenes of the film.

Matching Bergman is a young Gregory Peck. Peck, the stalwart American hero, probably next to Fonda, the actor most associated with liberal causes (Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), the first film to deal with anti-semitism, On the Beach (1959), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)) was available for the film because he had a busted eardrum and couldn’t serve in the military. Good thing, too, because Ingrid Bergman, standing at nearly six foot, was a challenging figure on screen. Almost no one could act with Ingrid except those willing to stand on a box. Peck needed no such device to rise above her. He is every bit her match in their weird role reversals: the male as the victim, the female as the investigator. Peck’s role strangely mirrors the tortured Madeleine of Hitchcock’s later masterpiece, Vertigo (1958). Both are characters haunted by memories of their past who need expert help to exorcise their ghosts.

Another splendid aspect is the film’s fun with Freud. Freud’s theories had been translated, but not widely circulated because of two wars with Germany. However, psychology reached the level of popular culture after the war. Psychology was a way to make sense of the madness of war and God’s silence at the violence and carnage of the Nazis. Throughout there are massive jokes about psychoanalysis, scoffs about shrinks and visual puns on craziness. Note the marvellous filming of Leo G Carroll’s gun, a phallic symbol that redefines Freud’s notion of the linking of eros and thantos. But despite Spellbound’s use of painter Salvador Dalí’s surrealist images, few understood that under his photo-realistic renderings, Hitchcock himself was one of the most successful surrealists of the era. He always situated his realistic images within surreal settings that tended to make all of his films look strangely hallucinatory.

When asked about his profession of evoking fear in the sixties, Hitchcock pleaded innocence saying that the seeds of fear had been planted long ago in childhood. ‘It all goes back to Red Riding Hood.’ For Hitchcock, the horrors of childhood embedded primal images in the mind of the audience. All he had to do was reawakened those memories, those Red Riding Hood fears. Spellbound plays on those childhood fears and uncertainties. Bergman’s Dr Petersen, supposedly the super rational psychologist, wrestles with her libidinous self. Peck struggles with his madness. But underneath, Hitchcock reminds us that the most devious crazies are those that appear rational.

Hitchcock trained as a commercial artist and was well aware of the impulses of sexuality and repressed drives. He was also English and was taught to bottle up those drives in his strict Victorian upbringing. However, Hitchcock used the cinema art to expose those repressed workings of the mind. From theories of madness in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Rebecca (1940) to the insane fixations of Norman Bates or Marnie’s traumatic childhood, Hitchcock was almost always involved with aspects of psychosis.

But here, Hitchcock’s theme of seeking to understand the irrational by rational means is cleverly exploited. Despite the film’s exploration of dream states, the complex coding of hidden messages, and a close encounter with psychotherapy, it is the values of romance and human emotion that shine through. To some degree the reliance on such assured emotional centrepieces turns some esoteric critics off the film, today. They perceive the emotional passages as a visual and intellectual cop-out. But in 1945, Hitchcock and the world were desperate to understand the irrational by rational means. Freud’s theories seemed to offer the best way to investigate the human potential towards violence and the propensity for guilt, so clearly demonstrated in the acts of barbarity of World War II.

Still, it is ironic that Hitchcock, in many ways the quintessential Freudian director, showing a marked obsession for female characters, themes of guilt, obsession, neuroses and psychoses, should pull his punches here. Spellbound is often critically attacked for its lush romantic score (Miklós Rózsa’s score won the Oscar that year), its pleasure in romantic solutions to world problems, and its reduction of complex issues to single word solutions: love, obsession, trauma. However, the truth is that Hitchcock was using the plot to provide the sort of assurance his audience needed at the war’s end. His usual ambivalence and questioning intellectual spirit would set the wrong tone for post-war America, a country that needed to believe that its massive sacrifice had been for a meaningful purpose. In a way, Spellbound is not only about unravelling Peck’s traumas, it is about unravelling a nation’s psychic damage.

This is not to say that Hitchcock, the director and auteur, wasn’t engaged. Imbedding his darker messages in the context of American traditional filmmaking is what makes him so remarkable. In the surreal dream sequences, concocted with Salvador Dalí, Hitchcock really shined. He also had particular fun with Gregory Peck’s Dr Edwardes, a weirdly traumatised doctor who might also be a killer. In one scene, he placed a straight razor in Edwardes’ hand as he was about to shave, and Peck gave off Norman Bates’ level glitches. Edwardes’ somnambulistic walk down the steps towards a sleeping Dr Petersen and her fellow psychiatrist, Dr Brulov (Michael Chekhov), toyed with the menace posed by the blade and called to mind Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog] (1929).

Finally, it is this obvious manipulation that makes Spellbound a delight. We know Hitchcock is leading us down a dark path. For him, it was this anticipation and dread of something to come that captivated audiences. He wrote a brief treatise on The Enjoyment of Fear for Good Housekeeping (!) in 1949 in which he tutored his readers on the subject: ‘Remember our rule: terror by surprise, suspense by forewarning’. For Hitchcock, watching Peck approach people with the razor created a forewarning of something awful to come. This created suspense. He differentiated that feeling from terror which he considered pure shock value. This is one of the reasons Hitchcock’s films are still revered today. It was the foreboding that kept audiences uneasy. Terror Hitchcock argued was short lived. The pleasure of Spellbound is the suspense, something that can be enjoyed regularly.