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The joking overlap of psychoanalysis and cinema is picked up by Hitchcock's Spellbound, "we all try to escape reality." The radio star (Ginger Rogers) suffers from engagement jitters, her fiancé (Ralph Bellamy) takes her to the psychiatrist (Fred Astaire) whose prescription for "the typical pampered female" is a good spanking. His theory of coordination is illustrated with harmonica and golf balls ("Since They Turned Loch Lomond into Swing"), a rich meal of lobster and mayonnaise and strawberry shortcake launches the experiment on dreams. ("I Used to Be Color Blind" is a forerunner to Gene Kelly's oneiric ballets, twirlers on a giant lily pad in extended slow-motion, cf. Deren's Meditation on Violence.) The heroine wakes up and is surprised at her own smile, "the most beautiful case of complex maladjustment" has a simpler explanation: "I'm in love with my doctor." Dances and trances, a screwball view of Mark Sandrich's original Astaire-Rogers seduction. Loopy from anesthetic, Rogers gets a Harpo gleam in her eye, using the elevator operator's clacker as castanets and borrowing a cop's baton to blithely shatter a sheet of glass. As the crowd at a restaurant is settling down, she and Astaire get the joint back jumpin' with a quasi-jitterbug riot, "every orchestra in America will be doing the Yam!" The conscious and the subconscious of romance builds to the bride with a shiner, a parallel theme pairs the aunt (Luella Gear) with the orderly (Jack Carson). Advice comes from the mirror reflection ("Kiss her, you dope!"), by then the hypnotized babe has a shotgun in her hand. "Change Partners" is the Irving Berlin solution, "can't you see I'm longing to be in his place?" Leisen takes it from there with Lady in the Dark, Rogers and all. With Clarence Kolb, Franklin Pangborn, Walter Kingsford, Kay Sutton, and Hattie McDaniel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |