Spellbound (4 Stars)

Last month was the 15th anniversary of my mother's death, so I was feeling sentimental. I decided to buy Arthur Hitchcock's "Spellbound", because I remember her saying that it was her favourite film. I also ordered two other films that I remember her liking a lot.

I remember my mother being a film fan, even though it was more inconvenient in her era. There were no videotapes, DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. Apart from the official cinema releases, the only way to watch films was television. We had our regular film evening every Friday. Every Friday there were two horror films on ITV, either the Universal horror films from the 1930's and 1940's, or the more recent Hammer Horror films from the 1960's. The schedule was that one film ended at midnight, and the second film began at midnight. My father went to bed and let the two of us watch television together. We usually drank a glass of sherry together, even though I was very young, 11 to 16 years old. Those were happy days.

Even though she watched horror films with me, those weren't her favourite films. She loved the film "Spellbound", calling it her favourite, and we watched it several times together. There's a story to it. She went to see it in the cinema when it was first shown in 1946. She was 14 at the time. After the film she bought the soundtrack album in the cinema foyer. It was the only soundtrack album that she ever bought. In the good old days it was common to sell LPs in cinemas. There were no DVDs, so the most people could do was buy the film music. When she got home she played it for her father, and he said that it was bad. He played the William Tell Overture as an example of good music. She said that it sounded just the same. But if she'd thought logically she would have known it wasn't the same. She liked "Spellbound" and she didn't like the William Tell Overture, so something must have been different. I remember the LP lying around for years. I have no idea what happened to it. It was probably thrown in the rubbish when she died.

The other two films she liked a lot were "Date with a Lonely Girl" and "Three into two won't go". I remember them, because whenever they were listed in the TV guide she'd get excited and tell me I had to watch them with her. I'm still waiting for Amazon to deliver them, and I'll watch them as soon as they arrive.

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The film is about Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), a psychoanalyst in a mental hospital in America. The hospital's director retires and is replaced by Dr. Anthony Edwards, a renowned author of books on the guilt complex. It's love at first sight. Within the first day Constance and Anthony fall into one another's arms. Maybe more happened, but in 1940's films nothing is shown or even hinted at. But it's soon discovered that he's a fake. He's a man suffering from amnesia who wrongly thinks that he might be Dr. Edwards. The police suspect that he murdered the real Dr. Edwards, so he flees. Constance loves him, so she follows him. She's not just his lover, she acts as his psychoanalyst trying to help him remember his past.

"Spellbound" is revered as a classic, even though it's now one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser known films. It was nominated for six Oscars at the 1946 Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for the Best Soundtrack.

P.S. I would have posted a screenshot of Alfred Hitchcock's cameo, but he's smoking a cigar. My blog is strictly smoke-free.

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