With Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
The film was shot on a Hollywood sound stage, the plot takes place in a mental asylum in the green mountains of Vermont. Spellbound was adapted by Hitchcock and Ben Hecht from the British novel by Francis Beeding, “The House of Dr. Edwardes”, in which the asylum was located in the beautiful French Alps.
Spellbound is one of Hitchcock’s most forward looking pictures of the 1940s: a thriller about a psychoanalyst at a Vermont mental asylum (Bergman), who begins to realize that the new director, Dr. Edwardes (Peck), might not be who he appears to be. Beneath the facile trappings there is 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.
The film, including surreal imagery contributed by artist Salvador Dali, picked up six Oscar nominations, including Best Film Score which features one of the earliest uses of the theremin, (an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist) – an instrument later associated with science fiction films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Purchase this month’s Pass HERE. Once you’ve purchased it, watch out for an email confirmation with links to view all four films
If you only want to watch this film, click on the WATCH NOW button. Closed Captions available for this film.
Watch the conversation with Steve Bissette (author of Green Mountain Cinema, cartoonist and teacher) and Luke Baynes, VTIFF programming committee.