The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“An intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

A fear of madness lurks in the dialogue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, a film that posits the interpretation of dreams as a science in thrall to sexual desires, office politics, and fractured identities. Ingrid Bergman is Constance, a woman cornered by the otherwise all-male staff of a mental hospital called Green Manors. After an opening sequence that suggests cracks in the staff’s composure, the hospital’s new director Dr. Edwardes (Gregory Peck) reveals he is repressing a secret that calls for rearranged roles: he becomes a patient—and more—under Constance’s diagnostic eye. Though Hitchcock felt that producer David O. Selznick’s micromanaging placed a ceiling on his elaborate ideas (not to mention on Salvador Dali’s surreal dream sequence), the film is large, accommodating conflicted romance, thrilling murder fantasies, and show-stopping compositions that turn the frame into a subjective field of view. This restoration premiered as part of Cannes Classics 2023.

“A great film … [Hitchcock] sees in psychoanalysis the medical equivalent of that ​‘confession’ which furnishes the theme of Under Capricorn and I Confess.”

Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol