Spellbound (1945) on Netflix
Approved19451h 51mFilm-NoirMysteryRomance
Psychoanalyst Dr. Constance Petersen keeps to her work at Green Manors, a Vermont mental hospital. She is drawn to the new director, Dr. Anthony Edwardes, who has a phobia of parallel stripes.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.5/1055,889 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. Murchison, who runs Green Manors, the Vermont mental hospital, is forced into retirement after a bout of nervous exhaustion, and the board brings in a renowned younger man, Dr. Anthony Edwardes, to take his place. Dr. Constance Petersen, a psychoanalyst on the staff, has kept her distance from the doctors who court her and given herself to her work. Edwardes arrives, and the two are drawn to each other. At dinner he has an outburst when she traces the outline of a swimming pool on a napkin with the tines of her fork. A patient is taken to surgery, and Edwardes panics in the operating room.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Spellbound (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Surrealist Salvador Dalí was hired to design the film's key dream sequence, but after the version he devised with Hitchcock proved too lengthy and complicated for producer David O. Selznick, most of it was cut: two minutes remain in the film, from what Ingrid Bergman said was twenty.
- Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, both married to other people at the time, had a brief affair during the filming of Spellbound; Peck revealed it publicly in a 1987 People interview, five years after Bergman's death.
- David O. Selznick wanted Joseph Cotten, Dorothy McGuire and Paul Lukas for the roles eventually played by Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman and Michael Chekhov; he considered Greta Garbo and Jennifer Jones for Dr. Petersen, though Hitchcock objected to Jones and wanted Cotten as Dr. Murchison.
- The Motion Picture Association of America objected to words in Ben Hecht's screenplay including "sex menace," "frustrations," "libido" and "tomcat," which forced cuts such as the removal of most of a violent nymphomaniac character, Mary Carmichael.
- Miklós Rózsa's score pioneered the use of the theremin, performed by Dr. Samuel Hoffman, and won him the Oscar; Hitchcock said the music got in the way of his direction, and Rózsa said he had not seen him since.
SPOILER
Spellbound was shot in black and white except for two frames of bright red at the end, when Dr. Murchison's gun is fired into the camera; the detail was deleted from most 16mm and video copies but restored for the DVD release and Turner Classic Movies airings.- Rózsa's music became popular outside the film, helped by Selznick's promotional radio recordings, and led Rózsa to write a full-scale Spellbound Concerto for piano, theremin and orchestra, a staple of the movie-concerto genre with multiple recordings.
- The score Miklós Rózsa wrote for Spellbound had an effect beyond the film itself: it inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer.
