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"Did you notice her blush every time we mentioned his name?" When she comes back, she's visibly moved. Edwardes," the new head of Green Manors psychiatric clinic (who's played by Gregory Peck, a guy designed for women to fall in love with).Įdwardes takes her out to walk about the hills, and the soundtrack swells into ecstatic romantic whooshing.
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Instead, it's a movie about how Constance, professional woman and cold fish, discovers in herself the womanly lover who can star in a Hollywood film.Ĭonstance falls in love-basically at first sight-with "Dr. (And also nonsense, for that matter.)Īnd so, Spellbound isn't a film about how love is stupid and professional women are awesome for not taking that stupidity seriously. Psychiatry may think that love is nonsense, but Hollywood doesn't. Constance is a skilled psychiatrist, and a professional success, precisely because she rejects all the "womanly" nonsense about love. Psychological knowledge empties love out, and shows that it's meaningless and silly. Edwardes:ĬONSTANCE: People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents. She doesn't even believe in love, as she tells Dr. The film presents Constance's professional skill as tied to her lack of womanly love and sexiness. Brulov tells her,īRULOV: Women make the best psychoanalysts till they fall in love.
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(Of course, she's all these things through the lens of Hollywood in the 1940s, when calling a woman "bookish" was almost as insulting as calling her "a serial killer.")īut her coldness is presented in part as what makes Constance cool. "Sexual Harassment" Fleurot says, a "sweet, pulsing, adorable woman." She's serious.
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FLEUROT: It's rather like embracing a textbook.Ĭonstance, with her glasses and her dowdy outfit, is not, as Dr. FLEUROT: Your lack of human and emotional experience is bad for you as a doctor and fatal for you as a woman.Īnd when he grabs her in his arms he pauses, rebuffed, and says:ĭR. Just check out what her colleague, the amorous (and creepy) Dr. She's cold, serious, and uninterested in romance. One of the first things we learn in this movie is that Constance is about the furthest thing from sexy and yearning. That was considered a waste of Ingrid Bergmanitude.īut Constance Petersen, psychiatrist extraordinaire, is determined to be that waste. You simply did not cast Ingrid Bergman unless you were going for sexy fragility. In Hollywood films of the 1940s, a young woman was supposed to be full of love, life, yearning, and sexy fragility… especially if that young woman was played by Ingrid Bergman.
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