"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.” – Preface to Spellbound

A star-studded Hitchcock, Spellbound was one of the first films to tackle Freudian psychoanalysis. Luminous Ingrid Bergman plays Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychiatrist at Green Manors insane asylum whose repressed desire is suddenly set aflame by the arrival of the famous Dr. Edwards. The new asylum director (Gregory Peck) immediately exhibits strange behaviour, raising suspicions about his true identity. When news of the real Edwards’ murder surfaces, Dr. Peterson is determined to solve the mystery before she loses her beloved, whose real name is John Ballantine, to a murder conviction. A bout of amnesia and budding psychosis lead to the analysis of Ballantine’s dreams, conducted by a bespectacled, German-accented Freud stand-in. Hitchcock personally enlisted Salvador Dalí to create sketches for the eponymous dream sequence, which holds the clues to the film’s central mystery. Dalí’s elaborate sets are like an Oedipal paint-by-numbers: among the many highlights are eyes painted on drapery slashed by a man wielding scissors, in a direct reference to Un Chien Andalou, and a deformed wheel that recalls the liquefied pocket-watch in his most famous painting, “The Persistence of Memory.” Despite executive producer David O. Selznick having balked at the final and more elaborate version of Dalí’s dream sequence, it is nevertheless stamped with the artist’s unique aesthetic and