SPELLBOUND | Psychoanalysis Ate My Mystery | The Critic Richard Thrill on Hitchcock’s 1945 Film

Spellbound, 1945, is Alfred Hitchcock’s murder mystery about Gregory Peck’s psychologist who isn’t who he says he is, then falls in love with Ingrid Bergman’s psychologist, who is exactly who she says she is, and then falls in love with him right back. The mystery can be summed up as: why is this man not who he says he is, and is that such a bad thing? Praised for its cinematography and the Salvador Dali sequence, it’s a movie that introduced the ideas of psychoanalysis to the broader public, for better or worse. 1991 was not a great year for Hitchcock, at least from Thrill’s point of view. The 1940s were 50 years old, something hard to fathom (or calculate) unless MOMA’s “The Art of the 40s“ exhibition made its way into your brain. Thrill attended the exhibition in April, shortly after seeing Silence of the Lambs, a film which may have also contributed to his uncertainty about the film’s merits. Hitchcock got off easy, though. Thrill was less kind to the Picasso, Piet Mondrian, a