Feb. 22, 2003 - 3:05 am
i was trying to think of another Hitchcock film to check out yesterday. looking at the times he was nominated for Best Director, i came up with this one. it's got Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in it, plus a dream sequence created by Salvador Dali. sounds pretty cool right? well, the Dali bit is pretty awesome. the rest of it's pretty goofy. not what you'd normally expect from Hitchcock. it's not meant to be goofy. it just turned out that way.
this is one of the first Hollywood films that was about psychoanalysis. it starts out at a mental hospital with Bergman as one of the psychoanalysts there. a new head physician is supposed to be on his way and it turns out that it's the very young Gregory Peck. almost too young. so he and she fall in love in about 20 minutes and then they start to realize that he freaks out whenever he sees any pattern involving black lines on white backgrounds. (insanity and fear are not things that Peck was meant to play obviously.) but anyway, they go off and try to figure out why he has amnesia, why he was actually pretending to be the head physician and really isn't, if he actually killed the man he replaced, etc. lots of plot twists.
so like i said, the dream sequence in this is very cool. pure Dali, if you're familiar with his work. but Gregory Peck was just put in this film incorrectly. he can't play this part for crap. and i was baffled by some of the more idiotic things of this film. really bad and overly dramatic lighting techniques were used. i mean the first time the two characters meet, there's this white streak of light placed over Ingrid Bergman's eyes as she stares at him. what i would call the "oh my gosh i instantly love you even though we've never even spoken...and it's made all too obvious by this obtrusive lighting technique they're using on my eyes" shot.
then there were some problems with the dialogue being a little bit less than clinical. two doctors speaking to each other at a mental hospital about a patient would not generically say "I think we should give him drugs to calm him." they would say specifically which drug they meant to use.
and then there's the time on the train where Ingrid Bergman is talking to Gregory Peck and mentions about all the new types of clothes she's going to start wearing when they get to have their normal life together. "I think I'll start wearing big hat's too...you know the ones that make you look drunk." What is she talking about? I had to rewind on that one. Did she really just say that with a straight face?