Hollywood, With a Dash of Hitchcock

Some Hitchcock Trickery

Some Hitchcock films are fancy-fancy and filled with fabulous shots: birds-eye shots from up in the sky; long takes lasting ten minutes or more; swooping cameras circling the city and peeping through windows—that's the kind wow-ness you expect from the Master of Suspense.

Spellbound doesn't have too much of that, honestly. It's mostly a pretty straightforward Hollywood movie, put together well, but without a lot of camera tricks or frills… at least compared to later Hitchcock efforts.

Still, there are some nice examples of Hitchcock's ingenuity. The use of the theremin, a creepy electronic instrument, to punctuate suspense scenes (like Ballantyne wandering around with the razor) is an early example of Hitchcock getting good work from his composers (in this case, Miklós Rózsa; read more on him in our "Music (Score)" section). And the scene where Ballantyne drinks his milk and you see Brulov framed through the bottom of the glass is a weird, gratuitous, Hitchcock-ian touch.

Another clever scene is the suicide. The camera shows you the gun barrel from the point of view of Dr. Murchison, who's putting an end to himself. The gun looks enormous… and that's because it is enormous. Hitchcock had an extra large gun (and an extra large hand to hold it) custom-made so the shot would look… well, extra large.

Dreams and Dali

The big examples of Hitchcock's unusual direction, though, are the dream sequences. The longer one, designed by surrealist Spanish artist Salvador Dali is the most famous.

Dali was a celebrity at the time, well known for his weird paintings showing dreamscapes with odd imagery like melting watches (source).

Dali's style—called surrealism—was influenced by psychoanalysis, so it made sense to include him in a psychoanalysis-interpreted film. "What I was after was the vividness of dreams," Hitchcock said in an interview about why he hired Dali (source).

Dreams in films, Hitchcock noted, were often blurry, but Dali's landscapes were always vividly sharp and clear. The dream scenes were shot outside in the sunshine to give sharp shadows and hard lines, mimicking Dali's paintings.

Originally the dream sequence was a whopping twenty minutes long, but it was cut back to just two minutes for the film. Hitchcock didn't direct it himself; instead, producer Selznik hired William Cameron Menzies to direct. But even if Hitchcock wasn't directly involved, it's probably the most Hitchcock-ian bit of the film.

Another surreal touch is the cut to the opening doors after Constance kisses Ballantyne (see our "Symbols and Tropes" page for more on this). Those touches are carefully separated out from the rest of the film as fantasy—but they foreshadow the more adventurous and unusual filmmaking that Hitchcock would perfect over the next twenty years.