Making of a Masterpiece: Spellbound (1945)

Psychoanalytical thriller sees Alfred Hitchcock delving into the subconscious
His second collaboration with David O. Selznick led to clashes and compromise
The film’s most ambitious sequence was designed by iconic artist Salvador Dalí
But Selznick ruthlessly discarded most of it, sadly never to be seen again
Nonetheless, the film and its score were critical and commercial triumphs

Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.

Spellbound: Writing on a Classic; Making of a Masterpiece; Collectors Guide, Pt 2: Home video, 3: Soundtrack, 4: Re-recordings, 5: Concerto

Spellbound aka Io ti salverò (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) Italian 1948 post-war release poster by Averardo Ciriello

Italian 1948 post-war release poster by Averardo Ciriello; its title translates as “I will save you”.

In an asylum haunted by guilty secrets, the beautiful Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) falls in love with her new colleague, Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck). But is the amnesiac Edwardes really a doctor, a patient, or a murderer? And how much does the mysterious Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) know? Alfred Hitchcock’s acclaimed adaptation of Francis Beeding’s novel, The House of Doctor Edwardes (1927) is a bizarre and gripping psychological thriller, with nightmarish visual dreamscapes designed by legendary surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

In Donald Spoto’s The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), Spellbound is intriguingly described as “a love story; typically, Hitchcock made his thriller a romance, and his interest here is squarely on the couple as a new variety in the panoply of male-female relationships”. Hitchcock himself called the film an attempt to “turn out the first picture on psychoanalysis”. A proud boast, perhaps, but not one which he was above debunking; “It’s just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis,” he disarmingly shrugged in 1966 when discussing Spellbound with fellow filmmaker and writer, François Truffaut.

Like many critics, Truffaut didn’t enjoy Spellbound, which he found “something of a disappointment”. His main reservation was that, despite the psychoanalytic storyline, for once Hitchcock had ironically reigned in his traditionally dreamy and surreal visual imagination. “One expects a Hitchcock film on psychoanalysis to be wildly imaginative,” Truffaut complained. “Instead, this turns out to he one of your most sensible pictures, with lots of dialogue.” Hitchcock could not help hut agree.

Such reservations aside, Hitchcock’s “most sensible picture” garnered six Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Director, and a statuette for Miklós Rózsa’s ominous score (which henceforth established the theremin as the musical indicator of madness). It also turned out to a major popular hit. Completed for around $1.5 million, Spellbound grossed over $7 million, surprising even regular blockbuster-creator, producer David O. Selznick. Despite Hitchcock’s own concern that “The whole thing is too complicated,” the public flocked to see the Master of Suspense lead two major box-office stars through a bizarre Freudian danse macabre.

Historically, Spellbound occupies an interesting position in Hitchcock’s career. According to critic John Russell Taylor, who wrote Hitchcock’s authorised biography Hitch (1978), “[Spellbound] marked, in some mysterious way, his definitive absorption into American cinema”. In 1944, having delivered the didactic, anti-fascist picture Lifeboat to mixed reviews and lukewarm audience response, Hitchcock returned to England to produce two political shorts celebrating the French resistance for the Ministry of information.

While working on one, Bon Voyage, Hitchcock collaborated with writer Angus MacPhail, the head of Gaumont-British’s scenario department, and together they conjured up a treatment based upon Francis Beeding’s novel, The House of Doctor Edwardes (1927) [retitled Spellbound following the film’s release]. But it wasn’t until Hitchcock returned to Hollywood, and the perennial sounding-board of producer David O. Selznick (who was himself deep in psychoanalysis at that time) that Hitchcock handed the project to Ben Hecht, who in turn brought it to life. Between them, Hitch and Hecht threw out most of Beeding’s novel, retaining only its intriguing central premise of an asylum director who turns out to be a villainous maniac.

Spellbound – The Exhibition, Dalí Universe | 2024 reports: ZDF, inM, BR24, AZ, SZ, vids, vid | 2022, trailer

Hitchcock reportedly worked well with leading lady Ingrid Bergman, although he remained reserved about Selznick’s ‘star’, Gregory Peck. Yet having been firm in his choice of players, Selznick, indulged Hitchcock by allowing him to recruit artist Salvador Dalí to design the film’s dream sequences. A long-time admirer of Dalí, Hitchcock wanted to utilise his style to lend an air of hyper-realism to Gregory Peck’s haunted visions.

“I was determined to break with the traditional way of handling dream sequences through a blurred and hazy screen,” Hitchcock explained. “I wanted to convey the dreams with great visual sharpness and clarity, sharper than the film itself. I wanted Dalí because of the architectural sharpness of his work.” Indeed, so keen was Hitchcock on clarity for these dream sequences that he originally planned to shoot them in them in the open air, where the light was preferable. Only Selznick’s budgetary restraints prevented this endeavour.

Throughout the shooting of Spellbound, Selznick reportedly adopted an uncharacteristically hands-off approach, rarely showing his face on the set. But it was back in the editing room that he reasserted his power, cutting two reels (around twenty minutes) from Hitchcock’s finished movie before opening it under the ironically changed title of ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound’. Exactly what was contained in those missing twenty minutes has long keen a subject of conjecture, but most sources agree that the dream sequences suffered most heavily.

Remake

Legend has it that Dalí envisaged a sequence in which a statue cracks open like an egg to reveal Ingrid Bergman covered in crawling ants. In fact, Hitchcock blocked this grisly concept as simply impossible, although Bergman recalls shooting a variation upon this scene. “I was in this statue, I broke out, and the action continued,” she remembered. “We ran it backward so it would appear as if I became a statue. It was marvellous. But then someone went to Selznick and said ‘What is all this drivel’, so they cut it.”

Alamy, Bridgeman, Getty, Imago, Shutterstock

Elsewhere, production stills attest to the exploration of many weird possibilities which did not survive the finished film. Yet Spellbound still retains more than its fair share of visual coups. Amongst its most memorable moments are a legendarily inventive shot of Peck slugging back drugged milk, and a shocking climax in which a character turns a gun upon himself, and thus upon the camera. This latter was achieved using a giant wooden hand, enabling Hitchcock to create an otherwise impossible perspective in which the hand and Bergman are in focus throughout. [Similarly outsized props were also used in Easy Virtue, Notorious and Dial M for Murder.]

The final red flash of the gun, which has now passed into cinematic history, was hand-tinted onto the black and white film [as per the deleted train crash in Secret Agent]. This sequence alone, of which Hitchcock had dreamed long before the shooting of Spellbound commenced, secures the movie’s place in the annals of groundbreaking cinema. Amusingly, this two-frame colouration also earned something else – in The Guinness Book of Film Facts and Feats, it is officially listed as ‘the shortest colour sequence’ in cinema. – Eu Pioneer LaserDisc (1994)