Word: spellbound
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...Spellbound (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov; TIME...
...Spellbound (Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov; TIME...
...Spellbound (United Artists) is a psychiatric thriller which makes the mistake of trying to 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...
Fortunately for Spellbound, Bergman smuggles her 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...
...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 of a locomotive whistle...