The subject of psychoanalysis didn’t become ready fodder for stage and screen treatments until the 1940s when theater pieces such as Lady in the Dark and movies like Spellbound came to use the science as a hook for their plots. The psychoanalytic themes used in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound may have constrained the filmmaker just a bit in molding the material to fit his very distinctive cinematic style, but the movie nevertheless manages to lure the viewer into its various mysteries and carry him along to their conclusions. Never as secure with murder mysteries as he was with pure suspense films, Hitchcock’s work in Spellbound is finds him working with an uneasy hybrid of the two genres, but the parts that work do so sensationally.

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