The New Pictures, Nov. 5, 1945

Spellbound (United Artists) is a psychiatric thriller which makes the mistake of trying to give the audience a lesson in psychiatry. Egg-shaped Director Alfred Hitchcock is up to his old game of chasing two frightened lovers through thousands of suspenseful feet of film to a slam-bang finish. This time he turns his formula and the police on Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and hounds them expertly through a hotel lobby, a railway station, a train. But thanks to Ben Hecht’s script, the real hue & cry is in the hero’s mind. Miss Bergman, disguised in hornrimmed glasses, scrambles grimly after Hero Peck through the dark corridors of his paranoid guilt complex. The result is often good entertainment, but it does not tingle with Hitchcock’s usual sustained suspense. There is always the suspicion that there’s a doctor in the house.

In a luxurious loony bin with Town & Country interiors, brilliant Psychoanalyst Bergman handles raving patients and wolfish colleagues with equally prim professionalism. But when the institution’s new head turns out to be tall, tousled, handsome Gregory Peck, she astonishes herself and the audience by turning up in his rooms on a highly unprofessional midnight visit. Since most of the medical staff seem to be only about two jumps ahead of the screaming meemies, no one pays much attention when “Psychiatrist” Peck begins to twitch and grimace over a few fork marks on the tablecloth. But Analyst Bergman quickly diagnoses her love object for the amnesia case he is. When he flees to New York she follows, determined to rescue him with psychiatry from a putative murder rap—and the Hitchcock chase is on.

Fortunately for Spellbound, Bergman smuggles her pathological hero upstate to her teacher and friend—cantankerous old Dr. Michael Chekhov (actor-director nephew of the late, great Anton) who resembles a kindly Sigmund Freud and so expertly milks his lines for humor that he steals scene after scene from Bergman’s tense seriousness and Peck’s dazed somnambulism.

The script allows Miss Bergman to do very little except tensely beg her lover to remember his boyhood. By flexing his jaw muscles and narrowing his eyes, Peck does his best to register the fact that all is not well with him. But despite the drag of the psychoanalytical theme, Director Hitchcock’s deft timing and sharp, imaginative camera work raise Spellbound well above the routine of Hollywood thrillers. Again & again he injects excitement into an individual scene with his manipulation of such trivia as a crack of light under a door, a glass of milk, or the sudden wailing of a locomotive whistle.

Most striking set: a dream sequence designed by Surrealist Salvador Dali. Notable Hitchcock trademark: a comic bit part (Wallace Ford as a traveling salesman from Pittsburgh) whose laconic leering is almost as memorable as the two old-school cricketers of Night Train and The Lady Vanishes.

That Night with You (Universal) would be a satisfactory scoop of vanilla if it didn’t try to be hot-fudge-marshmallow-pecan. The film was originally titled Once Upon a Dream, but Universal’s sales department made a firm pronouncement: “Any title with fantasy or the supernatural suggested is poison at the box office.” But Once Upon a Dream is still the right name for the picture.

The heroine, Penny Parker (Susanna Foster) frequently climbs out of herself in double-exposure to step into her dream life (a series of low-budget production numbers in a light operatic vein). Her waking existence involves a rich theatrical playboy (Franchot Tone), the youthful owner (David Bruce) of an all-night diner and six ill-clad orphans who play it for pathos. Susanna Foster wades into her role with breathless enthusiasm, bubbling and flaring as the script demands. Her ardor is not shared by Franchot Tone, who goes about his post-adolescent lovemaking with one eye on the lady and the other on the time clock.

As a comic fantasy, That Night With You tries to disengage itself from the world by the sheer force of its implausibility. After 84 minutes of such escape, most audiences will be content to return to reality, no matter how dull.