Spellbound

Alfred Hitchcock directed a handful of noir films that have aged like fine wine (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Notorious, 1946; and Strangers on a Train, 1951, come immediately to mind), but Spellbound isn’t necessarily one of them. Widely considered the first major Hollywood film to address psychoanalysis, it contains some of Hitchcock’s most famous effects (Salvador Dali’s stunning dream sequence, the series of doors blowing open to represent sex, the camera’s point of view above a panning gun barrel) and a story ripe with tension and uncertainty, but the foreground of early psychiatry can be tough to stomach: a pipe-smoking, German-accented doctor who’s a walking Freud-like stereotype, constant theremin music to signify mental confusion, etc. Ingrid Bergman plays Dr. Constance Petersen, a psychoanalyst at a Vermont mental hospital whose new amnesiac boss John Ballantyne (a youthful Gregory Peck) may be an imposter and murderer. Through both therapy and romance, she and Ballantyne work to uncover the truth. Hitchcock makes ample use of the color white: the mountain snow on which the couple skis (in front of an almost comic rear projection screen), the glass of milk Peck raises to the camera, etc.