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Spellbound (1945)
Spellbound is a 1945 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov, and Leo G. Carroll. It follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works. Although the film is based on the 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer, the plots are…
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock · Shot by George Barnes · Cut by William H. Ziegler · Music by Miklós Rózsa · 111 min
How it was made
- Salvador Dalí co-designed the film's dream sequence with Hitchcock, but the footage they shot ran to roughly twenty minutes according to Ingrid Bergman; producer David O. Selznick found it too long and complicated, and only about two minutes survive in the finished film, with the rest now considered lost.
- When Dalí and Hitchcock's design proved too difficult to translate to film, Selznick brought in William Cameron Menzies, the production designer of Gone with the Wind, to oversee and direct the dream sequence, leaving Hitchcock with little involvement in its actual filming.
- The film is shot entirely in black and white except for two frames of bright red spliced in when Dr. Murchison's gun fires into the camera, a detail cut from most 16mm and video prints and only restored for the DVD release.
- The MPAA objected to words including sex menace, frustrations and libido in Ben Hecht's screenplay and forced the near-total removal of a nymphomaniac character, but allowed Dr. Murchison's on-screen suicide to stand, an exception reasoned on the grounds that the character was of unsound mind.
Elsewhere
More by Alfred Hitchcock
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