| United Artists | Release Date: December 28, 1945 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
15
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Based on Francis Beeding's The House of Dr. Edwardes, scripted by Ben Hecht, and with Salvador Dali's notorious surreal dream sequence as a shocking interlude, this was one of Hitchcock's most romantic and popular '40s movies; it's also the source of most of Mel Brooks' parody High Anxiety. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]
A fascinating, grim, exciting motion picture, based on the current popular interest in psychiatry, and illustrating a new method of crime detection. [25 Jan 1946, p.17]
A seductive blend of mystery, psychology and soap opera. [14 Nov 1982, p.8]
The clues keep leading to increasingly darker thickets. [27 Apr 2001]
Trail-blazing tale of murder at an American mental hospital that helped make the sympathetic Freudian shrink a Hollywood standby. [24 Aug 2011, p.56]
With Hitch letting rip on the imagery - including a Dali-designed dream sequence - it's as colourful as black-and-white gets. [07 Aug 2010, p.43]
The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.
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Despite its stars, the film is probably best known for the surreal dream sets provided by artist Salvador Dali. [26 Feb 1998, p.35]
Of all the pop-psychiatry movies from the 1940s, Spellbound survives its kitschy elements -- wallows in them, even -- to remain as fascinating as expected from a collaboration that was contentious. [04 Oct 2002]
I could watch Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck whisper while staring deeply into each other’s eyes for ages, yet Spellbound still registers as a talky exploration of psychoanalysis, something director Alfred Hitchcock would later examine with more insinuating subtext in his masterpieces of the 1950s and ’60s.
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Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.
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