Spellbound (1945)
Spellbound (1945), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Dr Edwardes (Gregory Peck) arrives to take charge of a mental hospital and it's love at first sight with brainy shrink Ingrid Bergman. But he's acting strangely and it seems he is not really Edwardes, he's just under some traumatic delusion. Actually he has amnesia and feels tremendously guilty about something, and he's pretty sure the real Edwardes is dead...
Then it's off on the old double chase, with the police pursuing the couple, and they, unusually for Hitchcock, searching not for the real killer, but instead for Peck's lost memory. The escape and evasion segments are nicely done, with the added tension of wondering if he isn't a psycho who might kill her before it's all over. In a nice last act twist we have a real killer.
Some notable components:
A plot heavy with psychotherapy, as producer Selznick wanted.
A bizarre dream sequence by Salvador Dalí.
Miklós Rózsa score (Oscar for best music that year). Theremin!
According to the wikipedia article Hitchcock was irritated by each of these elements. In the Truffaut interviews he takes a bit more credit but says screenwriter Ben Hecht was the psychotherapy enthusiast. His final judgment: "The whole thing's too complicated, and I found the explanations toward the end very confusing." (He's often hard on himself in that book, but also note he didn't have control over the final film in those days).
The rear projection on the simulated skiing scene is notably bad, as is often the case in his pictures. He hated location shooting and I suspect just didn't care about a certain level of realism: the audience had to contribute some amount of imagination.
Freud and psychotherapy cast a huge shadow over the 20th century, seeming both scientific and avant garde. That's faded out now and it seems more cult-like in retrospect. [An afterthought: the movie undermines it's own therapeutic plot. In the end it is love and woman's intuition that is correct, not Freud].
