Spellbound (1945 film)

Spellbound is a 1945 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, and Michael Chekhov. It follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer. The film is based on the 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer. Filming of Spellbound took place in the summer of 1944 in Vermont, Utah, and Los Angeles. Spellbound was released theatrically in New York City on Halloween 1945, after which its U.S. release expanded on December 28, 1945. The film received favorable reviews from critics and was a major box-office success, grossing $6.4 million in the United States, and breaking ticket sales records in London. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including for Best Picture and Best Director, and won in the category of Best Original Score. Dr. Constance Petersen is a psychoanalyst at a mental hospital in Vermont. The hospital's director, Dr. Murchison, is forced into retirement shortly after returning from an absence due to nervous exhaustion. His replacement, Dr. Anthony Edwardes, turns out to be surprisingly young. Petersen is immediately smitten with him. They fall in love. One day, while kissing him, Petersen notices that this Edwardes has a peculiar phobia about sets of parallel lines against a white background. She compares his signature with an autographed copy of one of his books, realizing that they do not match and he is an impostor. He confides to her that he has killed the real Edwardes and taken his place. Suffering from amnesia, he does not know who he really is. Petersen believes he is an innocent man with a guilt complex. Overnight, he disappears. At the same time, it becomes public knowledge that the man is an impostor, and that the real Edwardes is missing and may have been killed. Petersen tracks him down to a New York City hotel, where he is living under the pseudonym John Brown.