Synopsis
When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man's murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Ingrid BergmanDr. Constance Petersen
- Gregory PeckJohn Ballantine
- Michael ChekhovDr. Alexander Brulov
- Leo G. CarrollDr. Murchison
- Rhonda FlemingMary Carmichael
- John EmeryDr. Fleurot
- Norman LloydMr. Garmes
- Bill GoodwinHouse detective
- Steven GerayDr. Graff
- Donald CurtisHarry
Recommendations
- 100
Entertainment Weekly
The Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence is still a dazzler, and deciphering it points to the real killer. Analysis the way it oughta be! - 100
Chicago Tribune
Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A] - 88
Boston Globe
A fascinating, grim, exciting motion picture, based on the current popular interest in psychiatry, and illustrating a new method of crime detection. [25 Jan 1946, p.17] - 80
The New York Times
Not to be speechless about it, David O. Selznick has a rare film in Spellbound. - 80
The Observer (UK)
Trail-blazing tale of murder at an American mental hospital that helped make the sympathetic Freudian shrink a Hollywood standby. [24 Aug 2011, p.56] - 75
Chicago Reader
The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but 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. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
An intriguing Hitchcock thriller which probes the dark recesses of a man's mind through psychoanalytic treatment and the love of a woman. - 70
Time Out
Spellbound is also a tale of suspense, and Hitchcock embellishes it with characteristically brilliant twists, like the infinite variety of parallel lines which etch their way through Peck's mind.
