Under the Spotlight: Salvador Dalí’s dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound’
By the mid-1940s, Alfred Hitchcock was deep into his Hollywood era but hadn’t yet established that glamorous Technicolor template that would come to define him for future generations. During this period, his movies were heavily influenced by film noir, built around atmospheric black-and-white cinematography and psychological complexity. His 1945 film Spellbound took those characteristics to an experimental level, featuring a dream sequence devised by one of the 20th-century’s most unique artists.
The film stars Ingrid Bergman as Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst who begins a relationship with Anthony Edwards (Gregory Peck), the new head of the mental institution where she works. Peterson and her colleagues soon learn that he is an imposter posing as the eminent psychologist, but according to Peck’s character, he has no memory of who he is or what happened to Edwards. Constance resolves to help him uncover his subconscious memories and discover the truth before he’s accused of murder.
Hitchcock was serious about psychoanalysis, a form of treatment that had quickly become a popular point of discussion in Hollywood and which many industry professionals treated as an occupational necessity. By today’s standards, the idea that a dream might provide a tidy map to a buried murder isn’t particularly water-tight, but in 1945, it was cutting-edge. To highlight the progressiveness of the subject matter, Hitchcock enlisted one of the most subversive artists of the day, Surrealist pioneer Salvador Dalí.
Toward the end, Peck’s character, who is now calling himself John Brown, recounts a dream he had. It’s the turning point in the film when Constance finally has the information she needs to uncover the twist in the story. As Brown narrates his dream, his face fades into flashes of light, and a sequence created by Dalí takes over.
In the dream, Brown plays cards in a mysterious gambling hall. A woman who looks like Constance visits each table, kissing the patrons. An older man who was playing cards with Brown stands on the edge of a roof in front of a giant, floating head before plunging into an abyss. The proprietor of the gambling hall appears from behind the chimney on the roof, holding a distorted wheel similar to the clocks in Dalí’s famous painting, ‘The Persistence of Memory’. The man drops the wheel, and Brown is pursued down the sloping roof by a pair of wings.
Dalí relocated to Hollywood to work with Hitchcock on the sequence. They designed it together, working closely on the themes and concepts for the imagery. Dalí’s preoccupation with eyes is incorporated into the gambling hall’s design, but several of his ideas proved too fantastical even for Hollywood to recreate. In particular, his ideas that the club feature 15 dangling pianos and that Constance dissolves into a pile of ants.
The sequence that Dalí devised stretched to a full 20 minutes, sending producer David O. Selznick into a panic. He demoted the artist and brought on production designer William Cameron Menzies, who had shaped the aesthetic of Gone with the Wind and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Menzies distilled Dalí’s vision to a grand total of two minutes. As a result, the sequence in the film is fleeting, and the footage of the remaining 18 minutes is lost.
However, in a twist worthy of Hitchcock himself, writer and film critic John Russell Taylor found a treasure trove of storyboards of the sequence at a garage sale in California in the early 1970s. Taylor happened to be a Hitchcock scholar and the author who would write his authorised biography years later, and his discovery offered film historians and fans a rare glimpse at the scope of Dalí’s vision. Photographs of deleted scenes also provide greater detail, depicting a ballroom sequence and a white statue that was meant to represent Bergman’s character.
Film fans can endlessly speculate about what might have been, but the two-minute sequence that made the final cut remains one of the most unusual and avant-garde set-pieces in a Hollywood film during the industry’s Golden Age. No one involved got what they wanted, but even the dreaded middle-ground holds up as a remarkably original collaboration despite heavy studio intervention.
