Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Great Moments In Movie Shelves #154

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There are a ton of scenes in Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound that take place alongside bookshelves, mostly right here in this office of Dr. Constance Petersen (have you ever heard a more outwardly sexually repressed name than that?), played by Ingrid Bergman with her hair as tightly wound up as her character. But how could you go wrong with the scene where the crazed nymphomaniac throws the book at her? You couldn't.

I was hoping that I'd rediscover Spellbound as an unsung great of Hitch's when I saw it screened at MoMA last week - i hadn't seen it in twenty years, give or take - but it's still to my eye not a great movie, unfortunately. It has it's moments, as anything Hitch did always does - Gregory Peck rubbing his phallic butter-knife back and forth over the symbolic vagina Bergman drew on the tablecloth (seen above) being a highlight. But the film takes it upon itself to explain Psychiatry itself in thunderingly obvious ways most of the time - the movie's too chatty when it should be...

... way way way more Dali dream sequences. But the movie's not quite as bad as I remembered it being either - there is a lot of Hitch's patented perversion seeping through its cracks that I must have missed watching it in college the first (and last) time around. The movie's sexual politics are desperately dated (so many jokes where women being nuts is the punchline) but as a time-capsule of the place where Freud was only just entering the mainstream it's pretty fascinating. Oh and it was shot in my hometown of Rochester!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I agree it's not one of his best, and I don't quite remember all the jokes about crazy women, I thought the way it reversed the usual gender roles was really interesting. Here, it's the man who's always on the verge of hysterics, passing out,"weak" and in need of help/saving while the woman is the authoritative, competent professional. I found that fascinating.

Jason Adams said...

You're right about the movie, Anon, structurally it does flip the roles and Peck is quite passive and weak in the film. But it also has a bit of a masculine panic with regards to that, which isn't surprising for the time period - go look through the quotes that IMDB has catalogued and you'll see a sampling of its "Women are nuts and should be kept in their place" riffs...