Spellbound (1945)

Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Hitchcock

My new favorite cinephile Matthew Coniam made a dreadful analysis of this movie in his blog Movietone Cameos; I'm pretty sure he's got it all wrong.  It's moments like these when I remember why I spend all my time alone... I'm a weirdo!  The other two commenters agreed with him as well.

Spellbound is pretty clearly a (subtle) satire on Freud.   How could you not snigger to yourself in that final psychoanalysis scene?  As a plot device, it's completely absurd, and Hitchcock knew it.  Also, the Dali dream sequence was totally awesome and random, and I don't know what Mr Coniam was bitching about.  I'm not as into Dali's stuff like as of my hipster friends, but plus ten coolness points to Hitchcock for getting him in on the project.  Or is that the producer's job?  Well, kudos to Selznick, then.

Alfred Hitchcock was a funny man.  If you ever got to see his television show, you'll know what I mean.  The stories are mostly run-of-the-mill B-movie fare and so less interesting.  What's more interesting are the kind of actors he chooses and the kind of scenes he shoots and so forth.  I don't know much about the technical stuff, but I couldn't help but laugh cynically to myself watching these ridiculously good-looking, quintessentially suburban, outrageously American couples whining about how hard they were working to get that next promotion so that they could move out of the streamline and into a real house, while secretly planning to murder each other or something equally sordid.  Not unlike that Gene Tierney flick Leave Her to Heaven where the look is all Lubisch, bur the story itself is film noir.

the famous dali dream sequence

I don't remember much of this movie except that I was surprised to find out that I actually liked Gregory Peck.  He was actually a good actor and likeable.  I remember as a kid being force-fed the film To Kill A Mockingbird in English class, and what's worse, having to listen to people tell me what a great and profound movie it was for years to come.  All I remember is that the movie and the book were really different, and the movie fucked up the book, and, if it wanted to work as a cohesive dramatic unit, it needed to either focus on the racism story or the recluse story and not both.