Word: pecked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Spellbound (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov; TIME...
...give the audience a lesson in psychiatry. Egg-shaped Director Alfred Hitchcock is up to his old game of chasing two frightened lovers through thousands of suspenseful feet of film to a slam-bang finish. This time he turns his formula and the police on Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and hounds them expertly through a hotel lobby, a railway station, a train. But thanks to Ben Hecht's script, the real hue & cry is in the hero's mind. Miss Bergman, disguised in hornrimmed glasses, scrambles grimly after Hero Peck through the dark corridors of his paranoid...
...luxurious loony bin with Town & Country interiors, brilliant Psychoanalyst Bergman handles raving patients and wolfish colleagues with equally prim professionalism. But when the institution's new head turns out to be tall, tousled, handsome Gregory Peck, she astonishes herself and the audience by turning up in his rooms on a highly unprofessional midnight visit. Since most of the medical staff seem to be only about two jumps ahead of the screaming meemies, no one pays much attention when "Psychiatrist" Peck begins to twitch and grimace over a few fork marks on the tablecloth. But Analyst Bergman quickly diagnoses...
...pathological hero upstate to her teacher and friend-cantankerous old Dr. Michael Chekhov (actor-director nephew of the late, great Anton) who resembles a kindly Sigmund Freud and so expertly milks his lines for humor that he steals scene after scene from Bergman's tense seriousness and Peck's dazed somnambulism...
...script allows Miss Bergman to do very little except tensely beg her lover to remember his boyhood. By flexing his jaw muscles and narrowing his eyes, Peck does his best to register the fact that all is not well with him. But despite the drag of the psychoanalytical theme, Director Hitchcock's deft timing and sharp, imaginative camera work raise Spellbound well above the routine of Hollywood thrillers. Again & again he injects excitement into an individual scene with his manipulation of such trivia as a crack of light under a door, a glass of milk, or the sudden wailing...