I’ve always loved watching Spellbound. The chemistry between Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck has us rooting for both of them as they fall in love. The fatherly figure who looks like a clone of Albert Einstein provides the perfect oiling of comic relief to keep the gears’ entertainment turning smoothly. The dream sequence has Salvador Dali’s fingerprints all over it. Spellbound was very well received. Of its six Oscar nominations, it won for Best Music. This might be in part because Spellbound was the first movie to make use of the Theremin. The haunting quality of the instrument was the perfect overtone for a suspense thriller involving psychoanalysis. Spellbound was beat out for Best Picture by Going My Way which won seven of the ten Oscars for which it was nominated. I mention that because so many things get lost if you don’t mention them, like twenty minutes. That’s how long the footage for the dream sequence was before David Selznick edited it down to two. We’ll never know what that amazing footage, collaboration between Hitchcock and Dali, might have looked like; it’s lost to the cutting room. But the two minutes that are in Spellbound held riveting imagery that I’ve never forgotten.
