Hollywood ventured into psychoanalysis throughout the forties but Hitchcock dived right in with this no-holds-barred psychoanalytical thriller set in a mental institution. Ingrid Bergman is an icy analyst and Gregory Peck a traumatized amnesiac posing as the distinguished psychiatrist he seems to have actually murdered. It looks like a forties period piece, but Spellbound is also a rich film, like other great Hitchcocks balancing a tender and engrossing romance with an exciting manhunt. And we probably do detect a smirk on Hitch's directorial face as the "MacGuffin" becomes transformed here into the obvious Freudian symbol--the gleaming knife, the glinting razor blade, the clutched gun, and the film's famous setpiece, the Dali-designed dream sequence.