Cleolinda: ***
Starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck; dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Not rated (1945)
To preface this review, I’ll note that I often like to read other reviewers’ thoughts on a movie before I put down my own. Not because I’m afraid I didn’t understand the movie or “got it wrong,” but because frequently, I don’t think about certain angles until someone else points them out; I don’t realize what I think until I have another opinion to disagree (or agree) with.
It’s a little harder to find reviews for “old movies,” but you can do it if you try. (Digression: What now constitutes an Old Movie? As opposed to a movie that simply isn’t recent? I’d like to reject the premise that it’s “one of those black and white ones”—plenty of Old Movies are in color—or that it was filmed before the speaker was born, because I’ve met way too many young teens who think Jaws is an Old Movie. At that rate, Moulin Rouge will be lumped in with Casablanca as an “Old Movie” by 2015. Let’s take the antiquing rule of thumb that an Old Movie must be about 50 years old. I’m sorry, but I just can’t think of movies from the ‘60s or—God help us—the ‘70s as “Old.” Middle-Aged, maybe. Where was I?)
So I dug up a Spellbound review on Movie Thing, and, to my surprise, the first thing out of the (male!) reviewer’s mouth was that Hitchcock’s film is sexist. Interesting. Well, honestly, her male superiors treat poor psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman like she is an idiot, and I confess, about the time she runs away with her new-employer-who’s-an-imposter-and-probably-a-killer, I myself am in no position to argue with them. Her old mentor, a delightful old man with a vaguely Teutonic accent not unlike Bergman’s own, goes so far as to tell her that “women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients.” Prior to that, the head of the Green Manors asylum (don’t we call them “mental health facilities” nowadays?) has told her that she’s “too cold,” too analytical, all work and no play. And then he hits on her. Typical.
But the asylum director, Murcheson, is on his way out, and the new one, Dr. Edwards, shows up. Also, he is Gregory Peck. A young Gregory Peck. A young, hot Gregory Peck. Bringing me to my second goal as editor (editrix?) of this site: Not only am I the Evangelist of Old Movies, but I’m here, in contrast to the over-whelmingly male webmaster majority, to bring you ladies cinematic hotness from yesterday, today, and tomorrow. (You’re welcome.)
So of course Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck—rather, their characters—fall in love, because Bergman’s Constance may seem naive, but she's got eyes in her head. And here Hitchcock employs a wonderful visual: the camera is pointed head-on at a corridor, and door after door swings open in a line all the way to the horizon. The symbolism of what love has done for Constance is obvious on paper, but rather eerie and enchanting on film.
I will concede one point: if this were all the movie was about, it would be dull as dirt. Fortunately, this is Hitchcock, so we’re just getting started. Turns out “Dr. Edwards” ain’t Dr. Edwards. Also, he has no idea who he is. Except that it turns out he may have killed the real Dr. Edwards. Oops. So he goes on the lam, wracked with guilt by what he assumes he did—with Constance hot on his trail, convinced that she “couldn’t love a man who was bad,” and therefore, Gregory Peck must be innocent.
This is where the charges of sexism come in: charges that the movie wilfully portrays Constance as a “fool for love”—or just a fool, whatever. I can definitely agree that the male characters in the movie are sexist towards her in their assumptions that, as Constance goes, so go all women. I, for example, might be compelled to follow poor Gregory Peck and try to help him, but Lord knows I wouldn’t go around claiming I couldn’t love someone who was bad—and I’d definitely be handcuffing him to the sleeper sofa at night, if you know what I’m saying.
However, as the movie becomes more and more surreal—Peck keeps seeing thin black stripes on a white field everywhere he looks, like bathroom tiles and bedspreads and bathrobes, what have you, and it freaks him the hell out—the film itself becomes more like a dream. And it’s capped, by the way, with a Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence (no, seriously, he really did) that’s pretty freakish unto itself. I guess what I’m saying is—modern patient/doctor/lovers thrillers owe a lot to Spellbound (paging Final Analysis…), but a literal remake of Spellbound wouldn’t fly today. The psychoanalysis angle—this was one of the first movies to feature psychoanalysis, by the way—is almost comically naïve, given that the movie was made in 1945. But the naïveté of both the psychology and the Bergman character works in black and white—like it’s a daydream you’re having, a romantic fantasy that doesn’t have to play by the rules.
It helps that Ingrid Bergman brings her usual charisma and intelligence to the role (“cold,” my foot), because that goes a long way towards making Constance seem less of an idiot. (Check out the penultimate scene of the movie, when she knowingly tells the killer what she’s found out about him. What did she think he was going to do, offer to ring the police up for her?? But then Bergman manages to save the day by convincing him that the only thing stupider than committing one murder is two. Oh, and telling a killer everything you know. But Bergman, as an actress, actually pulls it off.) What you end up with is less the story of a potential candidate for the Darwin Award as a born-again romantic who wants to believe that she can “cure” the man she loves, make him whole again just as his love has brought together “the prose and the poetry” for her, as Forster would say.
|
