SPELLBOUND
Spellbound: deep-dive into a Hitchcockian mind
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Spellbound turns 78 this year. Starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck and Michael Chekhov, this psychological thriller, presented in a restored 4K version at Cannes Classics, tells the story of a troubled man’s quest for identity.
Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman), a psychoanalyst at a Vermont psychiatric hospital, falls in love with J. B. (Gregory Peck), an amnesia patient accused of murder. To protect him, she attempts to recover his memory, the only way to uncover the truth.
Released in New York cinemas for Halloween 1945, Spellbound takes a deep dive into J.B.’s troubled and tortured mind. The amnesia suffered by Gregory Peck’s character is compounded by an omnipresent sense of guilt. The only clues to the murder of which he is accused come in the form of a dream sequence with a very deliberate surrealist style; after all, Alfred Hitchcock called on Salvador Dalí for the imagery.
The world-renowned “master of suspense” once again gives us a classic of the genre, containing all the key elements of Hitchcockian cinema: suspense, plot twists, and the famous cameos from the director himself. A critical and international success, Spellbound paved the way for Notorious a year later, which Alfred Hitchcock presented in Competition at the very first Festival de Cannes in 1946.
A presentation and restoration by Walt Disney Studios in association with The Film Foundation, with the support of the Academy Film Archive, and with the participation of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
