Spellbound

My dad loaned me a mess of books and movies over the weekend, so I guess we'll be making our way through that for the immediate future. Possibly also the intermediate future.

So, Spellbound. He must have bought this recently, hadn't even been unwrapped yet. Lucky me. I went in expecting that Constance (Ingrid Bergman) would struggle to prove that "Edwardes"/J.B. (Gregory Peck) was not who he said he was, that he didn't evee know who he was, and that he might do anything to maintain that secret. Instead, his amnesia was revealed in the first half-hour, and Constance helps him to recover his memory, and elude the police in the meantime.

Constance herself has it pretty rough. At the start of the film, she's chided for being an ice queen, too detached and clinical to really help her patients. Granted, this is coming from another doctor who's interested in her, so the accuracy of the statement is questionable, but that doesn't make it less annoying. Then, once she develops an attraction for "Edwardes", the doctors all start kidding her about blushing when she hears his name, or being too emotional. She gets it coming or going. The movie does slide dangerously close to that territory of the weepy female character, who sobs and asks a male character to fix things a few times, but for a lot of the time, Constance is in the driver's seat. She chooses to find Edwardes, to keep treating him, even when he gets loud or abrasive. She won't let him turn himself in, she prods him when he needs it, practically carries him at times when the strain gets to be too much. And she's the one who saves him in the end, with her mind, and what I'd suspect is the same detached certainty she was being criticized for in the beginning. Which is why I like Berman more here than in say, Casablanca, were I felt like she was just tugged back and forth between Rick and Victor.

Peck, for his part, carries an intensity that's a little frightening, which makes the viewer a little more doubtful about him than Constance is. Usually in movies, characters don't look directly at the camera, they look to one side or the other. That's what all the other characters do in this film. Peck has several scenes where he's staring directly at you as he speaks, typically in a frustrated voice that carries a hint of anger beneath it. Since you aren't certain what exactly he's angry about, it's pretty unnerving. Especially because Constance isn't looking directly at the camera, it creates a sense she's not seeing this like we are, which makes you worry she's missing something critical.

It wouldn't be a Hitchcock film if he didn't do try something with the camera. In this case, he likes to put it in a fixed location where a character is, and leave it there while everyone else moves  around it. He does it a couple of times, each time with a potential murder weapon in the foreground. It's that thing he likes to do with suspense, the bomb you know is under the table that might go off at any second. The camera swivels so that the other character is always in the shot, but the weapon is always there, too. You can't ignore the threat, and it leaves you dreading the moment something in the foreground changes. A hammer being cocked, a step being taken, something you're sure is coming.

There's also a dream sequence J.B. has that incorporates designs from Salvador Dali into it. When I actually watched it, I thought it looked silly. People falling off roofs, guys with some sort of cloth stretched across their face, walls of eyes. The more I think on it, though, the more I like it. Nowadays, you figure something like that would be done with CGI, probably look incredibly slick. The fact it's done with real sets and props makes it more solid, which makes it more strange. The guy with no face is all the weirder because I know that is a real guy, he does have a face, it's just hidden. Someone actually made the misshapen wheel he dropped after he stepped out from behind the chimney. It's a physical thing, which makes a noticeable sound when it's dropped. The man on skis pitching off the roof looks so silly and awkward, it's more like how I think a dream should go. The farther away I get from my first viewing, the more effective that dream is at sticking in my brain. It's impressive.