In Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), man suffers traumatic shock, man loses memory, man relives experience and regains memory. It's garden-variety Hollywood amnesia, hortus hollywoodiensis. The amnesia is neither credible nor possible, but it doesn't matter, because it's the world of film, where the most malleable of mental afflictions takes whatever form is convenient for the writer or director or the presiding mogul.
John Ballantine, played by handsome young Gregory Peck is the amnesiac and the questions the movie poses are, when will he recover his memory, how much help he will require from luscious psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman, and how many times he can he whine "I can't remember" and still get the girl. Bergman has a more complex problem: how to be a smart and also a real woman (always a problem in Hitchcock's wonderful world of misogyny). She makes use of that old dodge, a pair of glasses; when they're off, she's feminine, but when she dons them, she's intelligent. When did Hollywood decided that eyeglasses were a symbol for brains?
But if she has brains, why is she attracted to a man who doesn't know who he is but is convinced that he might be a murderer. It's as though the film itself doesn't take amnesia seriously and treats it as a plot-device rather than the distressing disorder that it would be to an actual sufferer.
It's a silly but engaging movie, perhaps too much of an advertisement for psychoanalysis -- which it endorses without a shred of skepticism. I suspect that the psychoanalytic themes, which haven't fared at all well these seventy years, will eventually doom the movie to oblivion.
There are some tense echt-Hitchcock moments when it appears that the amnesiac might be dangerous, but Peck and Bergman are just too pretty to be killer and victim.
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