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Spellbound (1945)
In director Alfred Hitchcock's psychological mystery-thriller:
- psychiatrist Dr. Constance Petersen's (Ingrid Bergman)
love affair with her handsome yet delusional Green Manors mental
hospital patient Dr. Anthony Edwardes/John Ballantine (Gregory
Peck), selected to replace the outgoing asylum director Dr. Murchison
(Leo G. Carroll)
- the image of the parallel fork lines on the tablecloth,
sled tracks and patterns on the bedspread (all lines on a white background
that caused anxiety attacks for paranoid, amnesia-suffering Ballantine
due to a partial recollection and witnessing of the murder of his
analyst - the real Dr. Edwardes - on a ski slope at Gabriel Valley)
- the scene in which the camera focused on the straight
razor carried in the hand of disturbed Ballantine as he approached
the old doctor
- the pivotal, brilliant nightmarish dream-remembrance
sequence conceived by surrealist artist Salvador Dali involving eyes
on a wall, a gambling room, a blackjack (21) card game with blank
cards, an angry proprietor, a sloping roof, a wheel, and a pair of
pursuing wings
- the blood-chilling sequence of Ballantine's vivid
memory of his young brother's accidental and tragic death by impalement
on a spiked fence when he fell from a roof
- the subjective image of the jealous murderer Dr.
Murchison aiming his gun at Dr. Petersen's back after she revealed
his treachery - and then after she left slowly turning it toward
the camera and firing suicidally at himself - with a burst of red
color gunflash (in the black and white film)
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