'Spellbound' (1945) - Movie Review

It's not often I come across a Hitchcock movie with a pair of major stars that I haven't seen. I thought I'd seen all the major Hitchcocks, but never did a good check on that. Looking at his filmography I realize there are rather more than I thought. Anyway, a Hitchcock movie starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck showed up at the library and was irresistible to me.

Bergman's character Dr. Constance Petersen is a "psychoanalyst" (trust me, that old term is appropriate here) working at an institution when their new boss shows up. Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Peck) is young and handsome ... and Petersen quickly finds that not only does he have significant psychological issues, but he's not actually Dr. Edwardes - and in fact he may have killed the real Edwardes. Unfortunately, she's fallen head-over-heels for non-Edwardes, as he's fallen for her.

The movie relies very heavily on what I take to be Freudian psychology: there are guilt complexes, phobias caused by events, amnesia, and dreams are interpreted. Peck varies between being his usual charming self, and looks of "shock" and "horror" which I put in quotes because they were so heavy-handed and poorly played. Bergman was okay, but I found the psychology so preposterous that the whole movie was a total loss for me. Peck was terrible, and it's far from Hitchcock's best.