Born in the very year, 1899, in which The Interpretation of Dreams was published, Hitchcock demonstrated a life-long fascination with Freudian ideas – about dreams, Freudian slips, civilisation and its discontents, Oedipus, the whole package of ‘popular Freudianism’. Spellbound is, along with Marnie, the film in which this close affinity comes most clearly to the surface.

Ingrid Bergman, in the first of her three great Hitchcock roles, is a beautiful, repressed woman (like the earlier Joan Fontaine characters), who works as a psychiatrist in a mental hospital, and has to confront the case of Gregory Peck on both a professional level and a romantic one. The film’s great set-piece is an elaborate dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, exploring Peck’s traumas, but it is notable too for the Oscar-winning score by Miklos Rozsa.

This event is part of The Genius of Alfred Hitchcock: Part Four, the final part of our complete retrospective of Hitchcock’s 52 surviving films (March 2nd – 31st).