Spellbound (1945)
There was a near-riot at MOMA last week during Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) when the audience at a 4:30pm screening mistook the 5 minute overture for an incompetent and/or sleeping projectionist. Yelling, shouting, and a strange dirge-like clapping were met by reactionary counter-yelling and bemused laughter until someone finally called out "this movie premiered with an overture!" The restlessness, panic, and anxiety that these darkened 5 minutes provoked whipped the elderly would-be hooligans in the crowd to a frenzy--you can't imagine just how close they were to ripping up the seats and storming the projection booth. Starring 
Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (in his first major role), the film was written by Hollywood legend Ben Hecht, who also wrote His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), and Kiss of Death (1947). Peck played Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly-arrived director of the secluded clinic Green Manors, where he meets Bergman's Dr. Constance Petersen, a sexually-repressed psychoanalyst (Hitchocock and Hecht were not shy with the "librarian" and "egg-beater" jokes). The David O. Selznick production featured the famous dream-sequence painted and choreographed by Salvador Dali and a theremin-heavy score written by Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa. The innate connections between Hitchcock and Luis Bunuel were most apparent in Spellbound; though the Dali sequence remains the most obvious, with Dali cutting eyeballs with 
giant scissors in an homage to Un Chien Andalou, Peck's journey through the Labrynth of the Guilt Complex directly anticipated Bunuel's Rehearsal For a Crime (1955) by commenting on childhood murder-fantasy and the return of the repressed. Peck's amnesia, however, was not triggered by a long-lost music box but rather through visual stimuli, which provided reason for one of Hitchcock's most macabre shots of all time. Another basic connection between the two masters of (surrealist) cinema is Hitchcock's latent Catholicism, which was here on full display, expressed as usual in fetishism and guilt. This particular screening was perhaps one-of-a-kind, as the near riot amidst the suffocating smell of the Bloomingdale's perfume counter added a heightened anticipation of violence and was the perfect set-up for the psychological thriller. The film features Hitchcock trademarks such as projected backgrounds, visual-textual juxtapositions (i.e. Peck and Bergman declaring that it is not love between them as they kiss for the first time), as well as beautiful shots of Old Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.
There was a near-riot at MOMA last week during Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) when the audience at a 4:30pm screening mistook the 5 minute overture for an incompetent and/or sleeping projectionist. Yelling, shouting, and a strange dirge-like clapping were met by reactionary counter-yelling and bemused laughter until someone finally called out "this movie premiered with an overture!" The restlessness, panic, and anxiety that these darkened 5 minutes provoked whipped the elderly would-be hooligans in the crowd to a frenzy--you can't imagine just how close they were to ripping up the seats and storming the projection booth. Starring 
Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck (in his first major role), the film was written by Hollywood legend Ben Hecht, who also wrote His Girl Friday (1940), Notorious (1946), and Kiss of Death (1947). Peck played Dr. Anthony Edwardes, the newly-arrived director of the secluded clinic Green Manors, where he meets Bergman's Dr. Constance Petersen, a sexually-repressed psychoanalyst (Hitchocock and Hecht were not shy with the "librarian" and "egg-beater" jokes). The David O. Selznick production featured the famous dream-sequence painted and choreographed by Salvador Dali and a theremin-heavy score written by Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa. The innate connections between Hitchcock and Luis Bunuel were most apparent in Spellbound; though the Dali sequence remains the most obvious, with Dali cutting eyeballs with 
giant scissors in an homage to Un Chien Andalou, Peck's journey through the Labrynth of the Guilt Complex directly anticipated Bunuel's Rehearsal For a Crime (1955) by commenting on childhood murder-fantasy and the return of the repressed. Peck's amnesia, however, was not triggered by a long-lost music box but rather through visual stimuli, which provided reason for one of Hitchcock's most macabre shots of all time. Another basic connection between the two masters of (surrealist) cinema is Hitchcock's latent Catholicism, which was here on full display, expressed as usual in fetishism and guilt. This particular screening was perhaps one-of-a-kind, as the near riot amidst the suffocating smell of the Bloomingdale's perfume counter added a heightened anticipation of violence and was the perfect set-up for the psychological thriller. The film features Hitchcock trademarks such as projected backgrounds, visual-textual juxtapositions (i.e. Peck and Bergman declaring that it is not love between them as they kiss for the first time), as well as beautiful shots of Old Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.
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