Spellbound (lost sequence from Alfred Hitchcock film; 1945)

A shot of the dream sequence that remained in the film.

Status: Lost

Spellbound is a 1945 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film focuses on psychoanalysis, and Hitchcock hired Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to design the key dream sequence in the film. The original sequence designed by Dalí was 20 minutes long, but most of it was cut by the producer, David O. Selznick. Only 2 minutes of Dalí's dream sequence appears in the final film, and the remainder has not been found.

Content of the Scene

On October 25th, 1944, David O. Selznick wrote:

"The more I look at the dream sequence for Spellbound, the worse I feel it to be… It’s not Dalí’s fault, for his work is much finer and much better for the purpose than I ever thought it would be. It is the photography, set-ups, lighting, et cetera."

Ingrid Bergman, an actress in the film, felt, however, that the original scene was much more effective, and said that:

"It was much longer and more interesting. It was really something to put in a museum. The final files did not include this complicated footage, in which I became a plaster statue in the man's dream (which meant we shot the film backward, with me breaking out of it). There were so many wonderful things in it, but they decided to cut it down to a minute or two instead of the twenty-minute sequence we worked so hard on. It was such a pity. It could have been really sensational."