Spellbound

SYNOPSIS

In his eagerness to make the first serious film about psychoanalysis, Alfred Hitchcock so diluted the fantastical elements in Francis Beeding's novel The House of Dr Edwardes, all that remained was a melodramatic plot and an awful lot of psychobabble. Not even dream sequences designed by Salvador Dalí could enliven the turgid script, made all the less palatable by the robotic performance of Gregory Peck as the amnesiac trying to unravel his troubled past with the help of sympathetic shrink, Ingrid Bergman. Hitch himself was disappointed with the picture, but there are enough masterly touches to prevent the attention from straying too far.