Spellbound vs. The Lost Weekend

Spellbound

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Spellbound is an extremely weird movie for two major reasons, both of which show up in the opening credits. One is “Psychiatric Advisor May E. Romm, M.D.” She was a Freudian psychoanalyst who treated producer David O. Selznick and his wife Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer of MGM, so she was very well connected in Hollywood. Selznick had Alfred Hitchcock under contract and wanted him to make a movie based on his experience in therapy. As a result, Spellbound is about a psychotherapist and her patient trying to solve a mystery by interpreting his repressed memories and dreams. The second reason this movie’s so weird is: “Dream sequence based on designs by Salvador Dalí.” After about seventy-five minutes of a standard 1940s black and white studio movie, it suddenly turns into a surrealist nightmare of eyeballs, a masked man, and melting objects. Then it’s back to the Hays Code mandated chaste romance and the bad guy getting his comeuppance. Other than the jolt of interest from the bizarre Dalí scene, the movie’s extremely dull.

After the credits, there is a long exclamation describing psychoanalysis as a method in which a patient is asked to “talk about his hidden problems,” so that once “the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered and interpreted,” “the illness and confusion disappear” and “the devils of unreason are driven from the human soul.” While contemporary audiences might have found psychoanalysis to be a new, intriguing field of science, modern audiences know that it’s more of a pseudoscience, so the pretentious description of Freudian psychoanalysis is tedious. The movie is basically telling you how to interpret it before you’ve seen a single scene.

The movie opens in a psychiatric hospital where patients are playing cards when one of them, Mary Carmichael, is called for her therapy session. Out of her earshot, a nurse whispers to the orderly walking with her, “Don’t take your eyes off her.” As they walk to see Dr. Constance Petersen, played by Ingrid Bergman, Mary aggressively flirts with the orderly, and when he responds with interest, she scratches his hand with her nails. In her session, she tells Petersen about how much she hates men, fantasizes about hurting them, and lured a man in for a kiss before biting his mustache off. She suddenly erupts, throwing a book at Petersen and calling her “Miss frozen puss.” The orderly comes back and escorts her away, and the most hilarious, over-the-top character leaves, never to return. The movie is unfortunately never this interesting again.

We meet the rest of Petersen’s colleagues, all men. Dr. Fleurot alternates between insulting her and sexually harassing her, insisting she’s too frigid and would be a better doctor if she had more life experience. He clearly means experience with him, as he hugs her and tries to kiss her. When she resists, he complains that “It’s rather like embracing a textbook” and jokes he wants to throw a book at her like Mary did. The head of the hospital, Dr. Murchison, is more respectful, but he is being pushed out and will be replaced by Dr. Edwardes.

Dr. Edwardes is played by handsome, young Gregory Peck, seventeen years before To Kill a Mockingbird. At an introductory lunch with the other doctors, he charms them all, particularly Petersen. He’s an expert on the guilt complex, a Freudian idea that when a child wishes something bad would happen to someone, even if nothing actually occurs, the child carries the guilt of that thought in the unconscious mind, where it may manifest as anxiety, paranoia, and even amnesia.

Petersen and Edwardes go on a date and fall in love immediately. They confess their feelings to each other and kiss as the score goes wild and Hitchcock shows a series of doors slowly opening, suggesting an intense emotional connection forming between them.

But there’s a big problem: Edwardes keeps freaking out over parallel lines, causing a scene at lunch when Petersen uses a fork to draw a diagram in the tablecloth and later he suddenly stops kissing her when he notices the lines on her dress. Petersen compares his signature on a note he gave her to an autographed copy of his book on the guilt complex and discovers they are completely different. Dr. Edwardes is an imposter.

This begins a long psychoanalysis of him, where they conclude he has developed amnesia to protect himself from painful memories. Whenever he slips into these memories, the score, composed by Miklós Rózsa, who won the Oscar for this movie and was nominated for The Lost Weekend the same year, uses a theremin to convey his distress. He remembers his initials are J.B. and runs away before the other doctors, who have also figured him out, can catch him. Petersen follows him to a hotel in the city, where they reunite, hug, kiss, and continue the analysis. They suspect he killed Dr. Edwardes and assumed his identity.

They visit her old mentor Dr. Brulov, played by Michael Chekhov, the nephew of Anton Chekhov, for help psychoanalyzing him. Brulov likes her but just has to sprinkle in some misogyny: “Women make the best psychoanalysts. Until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients.” Petersen’s gender is always on the minds of her male colleagues.

That night, while Petersen sleeps, J.B. becomes erratic after seeing some parallel lines and approaches Brulov with a straight edge razor in his hand. Brulov ignores the threat and hands him a glass of milk, which J.B. drinks in a first-person POV shot, the milk filling the frame as if it’s being drunk directly toward the camera. Petersen wakes up and finds Brulov collapsed in a chair. She frantically shakes him until he wakes up. This fake out is where the movie really lost me: it had been pretty dull up to this point, and the staged murder feels like Hitchcock trying to inject some drama just to keep things interesting.

J.B. is passed out on a nearby couch, and Brulov tells Petersen that after J.B. approached him with a razor, he slipped a sedative into milk and had him drink it. He believes J.B. is a dangerous schizophrenic, and when Petersen protests, he condescendingly tells her, “the mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of the intellect.” Petersen pushes back, echoing her sexist colleague Dr. Fleurot, who told her she’d be a better doctor if she had more life experience, arguing that the mind can only see so much while the heart can see deeper, and she can see that J.B. isn’t a murderer.

After J.B. wakes up, the two doctors analyze his dream. Finally, with just thirty minutes left in the movie, we get the only really interesting thing about it, the Salvador Dalí dream sequence. The walls are covered in giant eyeballs, and a man cuts one of the eyes with a huge pair of scissors, looking like Un Chien Andalou, which Dalí co-wrote sixteen years prior. J.B. is playing blackjack with a man when the casino owner accuses the man of cheating. The owner has a bag over his head like in René Magritte’s painting The Lovers. Then the man he was playing cards with tips over the edge of a roof, his body stiff like a plastic Army figure, legs held straight and together. The owner appears behind him and drops the melting wheel he’s holding. J.B. runs away across a Dalí desert landscape, pursued by a giant bird.

While talking about his dream, J.B. glances out the window and panics when he sees that it’s snowing and people are leaving parallel ski tracks on the ground. Based on his reaction, Petersen suggests they go skiing to uncover his repressed memories. J.B. and Petersen ski down a hill, awkwardly framed with rear projection behind them as fans blow their hair back and they stay just a couple feet apart while Petersen keeps glancing at J.B. uneasily. His memories slowly return.

The guilty memory he’s been carrying is from childhood, when he slid down a banister and kicked his brother into a spiked fence, accidentally killing him. This realization clears his amnesia, and he introduces himself as John Ballantyne. He now also remembers seeing Edwardes ski off the side of a mountain, panicking, and going on the run. Using this new evidence, the police find Edwardes’s body at the bottom of the mountain, but it has a bullet in it, and they arrest J.B. for murder. 

Petersen returns to the hospital and talks with Murchison, who has his old job back now that Edwardes is out of the picture. He mentions he never really liked Edwardes, which makes Petersen suspicious, since he’d previously told her he’d never met him. Petersen reviews her notes on J.B.’s dream with him, and together they deduce that the casino is the psychiatric hospital and the eyes are the guards, so the casino owner must be the head of the hospital, Dr. Murchison. Using details from J.B.’s skiing recollections, Petersen points out that the man falling off the roof resembles a skier falling off a mountain, and that the casino owner holding a wheel was actually holding a gun, which he dropped in the snow. Murchison agrees with her interpretation but reveals that he didn’t drop the gun, he has it right here and points it at her. He calls her “a love-smitten analyst playing dream detective” and confirms her theory that he killed Edwardes before he could take his job. Petersen stands and walks out while calmly telling him he’s been caught and should turn himself in so he can continue his research from prison. But as soon as she leaves the room, the gun becomes a first-person POV shot, turns, and shoots the viewer right in the face!

Spellbound was the first of Hitchcock’s movies to explicitly deal with human psychology, and it’s definitely on the weaker end in terms of overall quality. He followed it with Vertigo in 1958, about obsession, paranoia, and phobias; Psycho in 1960, about split identities and mother issues; and Marnie in 1964, about repression and childhood trauma. The difference between his good and bad movies comes down to how entertaining they are: it’s a toss-up between Janet Leigh getting stabbed in the shower and Jimmy Stewart’s floating head as the most memorable images in his movies. Beyond the Dalí dream sequence, Spellbound’s major point of interest is the spicy, man-hating, book-throwing, hand-scratching, mustache-biting Mary Carmichael, who disappears after the first scene. The rest is a boring romantic melodrama that exists mostly to deliver outdated Freudian pseudoscience, lightly coated in casual misogyny.

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The Lost Weekend

Directed by Billy Wilder

Imagine you’re a writer and an alcoholic. You write about a particularly erratic binge drinking episode and manage to publish it as your first novel. The novel becomes an Oscar-winning movie. But then you fall back into your drinking and end up killing yourself. This happened to both Charles R. Jackson, who wrote The Lost Weekend, and John O'Brien, who wrote Leaving Las Vegas. The movies based on these books are tough watches, and Ray Milland and Nicolas Cage each won the Oscar for Best Actor for their performances as these sad, hopeless characters, with The Lost Weekend also winning Best Picture. Made fifty years apart, they both have bleak, meandering tones but end in opposite ways.

Not having to follow the Hays Code, which required that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin,” Leaving Las Vegas has the alcoholic persuade his partner to stay with him as he drinks himself to death, which is probably the more realistic ending given what happened to the authors. But in the movie made under the Hays Code, the alcoholic protagonist is saved from his supposed moral failures when his devoted girlfriend encourages him to rediscover his passion for writing by telling his story. In fact, a hokey coincidence that they interpret as a miracle stops him from shooting himself. Like many Code-era movies, addiction has to be ugly and addicts must be punished, but there is still hope for those that are willing to change for the better.

Ray Milland plays Don, described as likable, good looking, and with nice manners. But everyone knows he has a severe drinking problem. Don is a writer stuck in a never-ending circle of trying to write, using alcohol to inspire himself, losing his ideas when he sobers up, then drinking again to deal with the despair of not accomplishing anything.

He and his brother Wick are packing for a trip out of New York City to help him dry out. Wick tries to entice Don with all the nice things they’ll have on the farm like “sweet cider and buttermilk and water from that well that’s colder than any other,” but Don snaps, “Why this emphasis on liquids? Very dull liquids.” His mind is on the bottle of whiskey that’s hanging from a string outside the window. Don’s girlfriend Helen stops by and invites him to go with her to the symphony before the brothers leave, but Don suggests Wick go instead. Suspicious, Wick searches the room and spots the string on the windowsill. He pours the whiskey down the drain. Caught, Don tells Helen he’s trying, and she’s understanding: “You’re trying not to drink and I’m trying not to love you.” She kisses him and leaves with Wick. Then Don finds some cash and goes out for a drink.

He buys a couple bottles of whiskey and greets a neighbor on the street, who whispers to her friend, “That’s the nice young man who drinks.” Then he goes to the bar and asks the bartender Nat for a drink, but Nat refuses, saying Wick had asked him not to serve Don. Miklós Rózsa’s famous theremin score grows louder, signaling Don’s desperation as he insists he doesn’t just have a watch or cufflinks to barter with this time, he actually has money. Nat gives in, and when he tries to wipe away the ring on the bar from Don’s drink, Don stops him: “Let me have my little vicious circle.” He expounds on how much he likes circles because they have no end and no beginning. Don is buzzed, feeling happy, creative, and confident, and compares himself to a long list of artists: Michelangelo, Van Gogh, John Barrymore, Shakespeare. More and more rings appear on the bar in front of him.

After Nat kicks him out of the bar, Don stumbles home, sees Wick and Helen, and hides while listening to them complain about him. Wick supports Don financially, but after six years, he’s fed up. Helen argues that Don’s drinking is an illness just like any other. Don sneaks past them into the empty apartment and pours himself a drink. The camera becomes a POV shot that goes directly into his glass.

The next day, Don goes back to the bar so early Nat’s still drinking coffee. Nat pours him a drink and tells him Helen was looking for him. Don describes the feeling of waking up and not knowing if it’s sunrise or sunset, which scares him because he doesn’t know if the liquor stores or bars are open. He feels like he’s on a merry-go-round, going round and round.

He tells Nat he’s thinking about writing a novel about his drinking, called The Bottle. It will start when he met Helen three years ago. He was watching La Traviata but fixated on the champagne the characters on stage were drinking. He began sweating as he saw the singers transform into a row of identical, empty trench coats. These were all his coat, and he could see, with X-ray vision, the bottle of whiskey he’d left in his pocket. Desperate for a drink, he went to the coat check, but the clerk had mixed up his ticket and gave him a woman’s leopard coat instead of his own. So he clung to the coat until the opera ended and he finally met its owner, Helen. He was initially rude and impatient with her but apologized after she called him out. They talked for a while and found they liked each other. But as he was leaving, the bottle dropped out of his pocket and shattered on the ground. Despite this, she invited him to a cocktail party.

Somehow, Don managed to avoid drinking that night and for weeks after. But then, when he was about to meet her parents, he overheard them say they didn’t think he was good enough for her. He panicked and went back to his apartment to drink. Helen found him there, drunk and self-pitying: “I’m not a drinker. I’m a drunk.” He explained to her that he had so much success in college that he dropped out, thinking he was going to be the next Hemingway. He moved to New York with his typewriter but couldn’t write anything. So his vicious circle of failing to write and drinking to cope began. It got so bad, he bought a gun to kill himself, but then pawned it to buy some whiskey. He called it “the flop suicide of a flop writer.” But Helen didn’t give up on him, saying she was going to help him fight it.

Hearing this, Nat is skeptical. He’s seen a lot of drunks, and tells Don he’ll probably still go through with killing himself. But Don doesn’t want to hear it. He indignantly pounds the bar, claiming he skipped the trip with his brother so he could write. Back at his apartment, he sits at his typewriter and writes:

The Bottle

A Novel by Don Birman

To Helen With All My Love

But that’s as far as he gets. He gets antsy and goes out for a drink.

Then he continues along his endless circle. He rips the first page of his novel out of the typewriter and tries to pawn it, humiliates himself trying to pay for a drink by stealing money from a woman’s purse, begs Nat for a drink and is kicked out, and then tumbles down a flight of stairs. He wakes up in the alcoholic ward of a hospital surrounded by men suffering from delirium tremens. A sinister orderly tells him this won’t be his last visit to “Hangover Plaza” and says, “Delirium is a disease of the night. Good night.” Don wakes up to a man screaming while nurses, doctors, and cops wrestle him to the “violent ward.” He sneaks out during the commotion. No longer well mannered, he scares a liquor store owner into giving him a bottle of whiskey and drinks it at home. But in the middle of the night, he’s terrified to see a mouse scratching at a hole in the wall until a bat attacks it and blood drips down the wall. His screaming alerts a neighbor, who calls Helen. Helen turns on the light and shows him there’s nothing there.

Feeling like it’s impossible to escape his vicious circle, Don takes Helen’s leopard coat to the pawn shop. She confronts him, sad that he would sell the coat that brought them together, and he tells her not to be sentimental. She finds out from the pawn shop owner that he traded it for a gun. She finds Don at his place just as he’s about to shoot himself. She suggests they have a drink together. He’s confused, and she explains, “It’s just that I’d rather have you drunk than dead.”

He argues that he’s already dead, he died that weekend of alcohol, fear, and shame. He asks her why she’s still trying to help him, if she’s expecting a miracle. Then the doorbell rings: it’s Nat with his typewriter, which he fished out of the river after Don fell down the stairs. Helen tells Don he’s meant to write. He says he didn’t even write the first line. Reframing Don’s vicious circles, she says he couldn’t write the beginning because he didn’t know the ending, but now he does. He agrees, saying, “I wonder how many others that are like me. Poor bedeviled guys, on fire with thirst. Such comical figures to the rest of the world, as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree.”

It’s hard to watch Don spiral out of control, but like most of Billy Wilder’s movies, The Lost Weekend is still entertaining because it has smart writing and believable characters. But like a lot of Hays Code-era movies, it also becomes preachy, feeling less like a character study and more like a lesson about resisting temptation. The circle motif, visualized as drink rings on the bar, represents Don’s cycle of writing, drinking, failing, and starting again.

The problem is the ending doesn’t really break that circle. After the nightmare sequence when Don wakes up in the alcohol ward surrounded by screaming drunks and then becomes one himself, hallucinating animals fighting to the death in his walls, his decision to kill himself to end his suffering is dark but realistic. But then his long-suffering girlfriend continues to support him even though he keeps letting her down, selling her leopard coat that brought them together. A perfectly timed act of generosity from the bartender who had earlier said he expected Don would die causes him to change his mind. The ending feels overly convenient, but the movie still shows a cycle that almost never breaks this cleanly.

AND THE OSCAR GOES TO . . . BILLY WILDER