Alfred Hitchcock - Spellbound [+Extras] (1945)
Language English + Commentary Track Subtitles English, French, Spanish (external .srt)
All credit for this beautiful rip goes to bandapartmental. I stole most of his announce too. :)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038109/
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Synopsis: The head of the Green Manors mental asylum Dr. Murchison is retiring to be replaced by Dr. Edwardes, a famous psychiatrist. Edwardes arrives and is immediately attracted to the beautiful but cold Dr. Constance Petersen. However, it soon becomes apparent that Dr. Edwardes is in fact a paranoid amnesiac impostor. He goes on the run with Constance who tries to help his condition and solve the mystery of what happened to the real Dr. Edwardes.
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Just about everything about Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film's critical reputation. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that "one can make no claim for Spellbound as an achieved work of art," citing, among its shortcomings, "the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script" (83). Many, even among Hitchcock's admirers, would agree. Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock's masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor a Vertigo (1958). On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock's films in which "questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied - questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo - become overt subject matter" (138).
Ironically, this very overtness of the film's concern with such questions is often held to be the source of its problems. Spellbound was not only, as Thomas Leitch says, Hitchcock's "most determined attempt to employ the jargon and images of psychoanalysis"(130), it was probably Hollywood's most ambitious attempt up to that time to introduce the talking cure to a mass audience. The solemn opening title, more suggestive of docudrama than melodrama, immediately announces this ambition in the most explicit way:
Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted, the illness and confusiondisappear ... and the evils of unreason are driven from the human soul.
Not a very sophisticated account of psychoanalysis, admittedly (nor even, as it turns out, a very accurate foreshadowing of the film's plot), but earnest to a fault. Hitchcock himself seems later to have regarded this earnestness as something of an embarrassment, assuring Truffaut that the film was really "just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis" (165). Most of Hitchcock's critics, however, seem to think that Spellbound takes its psychoanalysis, "pseudo" or otherwise, very seriously indeed. Thomas Leitch, for one, believes that that is precisely the problem with the film, that "Hitchcock is so determined to penetrate the mysteries of his hero's troubled mind that for the only time in his career he takes the MacGuffin as seriously as his characters do" (130).
Andrew Britton claims that the problem with the film's treatment of psychoanalysis is not simply that it is too serious, but rather that it is so deeply and fundamentally confused. He argues that this confusion, however, is the film's redeeming virtue, that its "interest lies in the nature of its 'badness': in the tension between the affirmation and justification of fundamental ideological assumptions, and a repressed meaning which is everywhere at odds with them" (80). Most of Spellbound's critics see the film as informed by some such tension, if not always, or not exclusively, in terms of its handling of psychoanalysis. Robin Wood notes, comprehensively, a "split in the thematic material," a switch from murder mystery to love story as apparent generic model, and a shift from John Ballantine (Gregory Peck) to Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) as apparent protagonist" (44). Everything, indeed, seems double.
This divided film obligingly provides us with a vivid and appropriate, albeit probably unintended, emblem of its own divided nature early in its central dream sequence: the image of an oversized pair of scissors cutting through an eye painted on a curtain. No doubt the image was intended by its designer, Salvador Dali, at least partially as an allusion to the infamous opening shot of his and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928), an extreme close-up of a razor slicing through an eyeball, but its suggestiveness extends far beyond its probable origin. Psychoanalytically inclined commentators differ, not only about the appropriate terms for analysis of this image, but also, more fundamentally, about the identity of the psyche to be analyzed. Reading the image in orthodox Freudian terms, for instance, Andrew Britton sees it as revealing what is going on in Ballantine's mind, suggesting, predictably, "the sexual wish on which the dream is based" (80). Reading it in more contentious but equally predictable Lacanian terms, Robert Samuels sees it as revealing what was going on, not in the protagonist's mind, but rather in the filmmaker's, as "representing Hitchcock's indication of the way that the subject of vision is cut or barred by the system of Symbolic representation" (37).
"The Parted Eye: Spellbound and Psychoanalysis" by David Boyd
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Rip from the "MGM Hitchcock Premiere Collection"
File Size (in bytes):...........................1,572,147,200
--- Video Information ---
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Duration (hh:mm:ss):............................1:51:25
Frame Count:....................................160258
Frame Width (pixels):...........................640
Frame Height (pixels):..........................480
Aspect Ratio:...................................1.333
Frames Per Second:..............................23.976
Video Bitrate (kbps):...........................1643
......MPEG-4......B-VOP........................
Quality Factor (bits/pixel)/frame:..............0.223"
--- Audio Information ---
Audio Codec:....................................0x0055 MPEG-1 Layer 3
Audio Sample Rate (Hz):.........................44100
Audio Bitrate(kbps):............................112
Audio Bitrate Type ("CBR" or "VBR"):............CBR
Audio Channel Count:............................2
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