"Spellbound" (1945)

Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) is everything I have ever wanted a Hitchcock film to be.

My intial reaction was that I'd discovered my new favorite Hitchcock film, but when I think of the other contender - and Hitchcock's true masterpiece - Psycho (1960), I know I'm fooling myself to think that anything else could ever really take that top spot. There's just something about Norman Bates.

But Spellbound has to be, without a shadow of a doubt (a little Hitchcock humor), my other favorite Hitchcock film. I adore it.

It's a love story about a girl who can't help but fall in love with a man who may be a murderer. The theme of the illogical nature of love, and how that can be dangerous when you've got a murderer on the loose, is one of my favorite issues to see cinema investigate. Both the 1947 and 2010 versions of Brighton Rock and Plein Soleil (1960) all deal with this very issue - and are some of my favorites.

When it comes to love, what strange psychological process do we undergo that makes us completely abandon sense? Spellbound depicts this process via Ingrid Bergman's character, who we see transform from clinical doctor to obsessed lover. And, admittedly, it wouldn't be hard to fall in love with the young, handsome Gregory Peck.

Speaking of him, is nobody else totally freaked out by how much Gregory Peck looks like Anthony Perkins?? I wasn’t sure if I was terrified of Gregory Peck as this disturbed - and lovable - would-be murderer, or terrified of him because he looks so much like Anthony Perkins in his role in Psycho.

Was I just bringing all of my emotional baggage from that film to this one? Was that fear just echoes of Anthony Perkins's haunting performance being transferred onto Gregory Peck? Is this all just the film's psuedo-psychoanalysis rubbing off on me?

Then there's the score (thank you, Miklós Rózsa). Click the video below of Spellbound's title sequence to immediately understand what I mean:

Hitchcock films are notorious (a little more Hitchcock humor) for their brilliant music, but the score of Spellbound captures the film's essence perfectly. Right from the film's first moments - over that glorious title sequence of bare branches and leaves swirling in the wind - the score is sweeping and breath-taking, a kind of dark, bewitched (in the Sinatra sense of the word) love story, all right in the sound. Nothing has even happened yet and already I feel like I'm in the middle of some gorgeous drama.

Essentially, Spellbound is a love story as well as a psychological thriller. I know there's been a lot of hooey about the inaccurate representation of psychology methods in the film, but I'm on Hitchcock's side: it's only a movie. For me, the same rule applies here as in science-fiction: the film world is not anchored in the logic of the real. Besides, this isn't just your usual psychological trhiller. In Spellbound, psychology is treated with a kind of otherworldly reverence, almost like magic, making the title even more fitting.

There are so many great lines about the dizzying logic of love. The way Ingrid Bergman says "I couldn't feel this way toward a man who was bad, who had committed murder. I couldn't feel this pain for someone who was evil." How Gregory Peck tells Ingrid "I think you're quire mad. You're much crazier than I, to do all this for a creature without a name." And when Michael Checkhov, as Dr. Alexander Brulov, exclaims to Ingrid: "We are speaking of a schizophrenic, and not a valentine!" Hitchcock's dark humor would find it hilarious how easy it is, when we are in love, to get the two confused.

There's all sorts of other brilliant Hitchcock motifs to be found here. Eye glasses motifs, the centrality of the kissing scene, the idea of masks, and a really incredible scene involving a razor. The chaos world is definitely at work in Spellbound. The film looks at love as a psychological problem. There's even chaos in what it means to be human. Hitchcock uses the film to poke fun at the idea that humanity is so full of chaos that we need psychoanalysis simply to find out, as Dr. Brulov says, "what the devil you're trying to say to yourself."

Summary: Spellbound: You've got a twisted psychological thriller combined with a gorgeous romance by the brilliant Alfred Hitchcock. I'm smitten.