Spellbound
Dr. Alex Brulov: Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients.
I am exceedingly torn with this one.
I LOVE Ingrid Bergman and there are countless films of Gregory Peck's I thoroughly enjoy. Alfred Hitchcock is an incredible director with a truly delightfully dark and twisted sense of humor. The opening snippets of his TV show were my favorite parts. He weaves great stories with excellent camerawork that have become iconic. Including the pistol that follows Bergman's Dr. Constance Petersen out of the room before turning around to its owner and to us, the audience.
Also, Michael Chekhov's Dr. Alexander Brulov is the highlight of the movie with some of the best lines. Stealing scene after scene after scene.
It is the character of Dr. Petersen that just aggravated me to no end. A scientific woman of very high standing and while her colleagues may take pot shots at her behind her back (which is what boys do when a girl kicks their @ss at a shared profession) they all do agree on her ability and intelligence.
Its how she crumbles, so easily, into a lost child unable to think, unable to act and forever panicking and seeking out, either others' help or "Let's just run away!" futility.
It drove me crazy and instead of my support for her, to believe she'll come out on top and prove them all wrong, I was, even knowing the outcome from previous viewings, in full agreement: Girl, for a brainiac, you are an idiot. He is the murderer and these high school puppy love emotions are going to get you killed.
Some of it is also that Peck's character is written off as the perfect scapegoat and his guilt appears as an absolute given throughout the entire film. To the point that the ending I am always waiting for is the two of them, having escaped the police are in an isolated cabin in a forest strewn mountainside. She rushes into his arms, ecstatic at the outcome and, holding her, his eyes, callous, tells her,
"They're right. All of them. For such an accomplished psychiatrist, you are nothing but a fool."
His hands close in on her throat. Squeezing the life from her.
"Because, in your foolish heart, you could not see what your scientific mind knew to be true. I am a murderer."
The camera moves in to capture her bulging eyes as the life leaves her. The shock and horror is all that is left on her dead face.
The end scene is her colleagues conversing, or perhaps, even a seminar where Dr. Brulov is making his final point, that this a prime example of the importance of why a psychiatrist MUST remain emotionally indifferent with their patients.