Spotlight
Spotlight Date: 16-January-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Spellbound (1945), Anastasia (1956)
The films in this week's Spotlight stand out from others in the impostor series* in that (a) they star Ingrid Bergman, and (b) the true identity of their central impostor is unknown even to him or herself. The first movie, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, is part murder mystery, part love story, and part dissertation on psychoanalysis — a mixture which comes together surprisingly well. It concerns a man (Gregory Peck) who arrives at a mental hospital to take over as head doctor and behaves more like a patient instead. Because he's a colossal hottie, and because she's an old maid before her time, the female member of the staff (Bergman) risks her career and life to get at the root of his illness. (Taunts one of her colleagues, "your lack of human and emotional experience is bad for you as a doctor … and fatal for you as a woman." She shows him!) Within two days of meeting she and her patient are on the lam, racing to figure out who he is and whether he killed the doctor he was impersonating before the law closes in.
Spellbound features one of Bergman's most agreeable performances and is notable for its use of imagery. Some of the visual effects seem hokey (at least today), as when Peck first kisses his virgin champion and we see a corridor of doors opening one after the other. Other imagery is effectively creepy. When Bergman and her old mentor (Michael Chekhov) analyze Peck's dream, it unspools in a famous sequence designed by Salvador Dali with giant eyeballs, faceless men, and melting wheels. Even the patient's amnesia and guilt complex manifest themselves as a single image: lines across a white background, the sight of which sends him into a trance. In a story where an impostor is hidden from himself by layers of experience too painful to be faced head-on, a dream answers every question, impulses decide the future, and Freudianism saves the day.
In Anastasia, Bergman plays the confused impostor and Yul Brynner the person who leads her to answers, although without the bedside manner she showed to Peck. The idea for this movie (and the stage play that preceded it) derived from one of the most interesting cases of questionable identity in history. Several months after the Russian Revolution began in February 1917, the toppled family of Tsar Nicholas II was herded into a basement and shot and bayoneted to death. A rumor quickly spread that the youngest daughter, Anastasia, had survived the massacre and escaped. In the mid-1920s a woman who had spent time in a mental hospital became a celebrity by claiming, with some convincing proof, that she was the lost princess. The movie tells a fictionalized version of her story which puts a cap on a mystery that spanned decades in real life.
Bergman's Anastasia first appears as a suicidal hobo whose only hope for curing her amnesia is finding someone to belong to (a common basis for self-identity). She is literally plucked off a Paris street by one General Bounine (Brynner), a Russian aristocrat who craves social prominence and all the money he can pocket through legal or illegal means. Bounine and his cronies have been searching for a woman whom they can pass off as Anastasia in order to bilk funds from other Russian expatriates. Even though she's unhinged, Bergman seems the ideal choice because she believes she might be Anastasia — and she might in fact be right.
The movie doesn't commit itself to the truth or falsehood of Anastasia's claim. Instead, it shows how Bounine grooms her to make the best impression and how she finds herself (and him) in the process. (The romance is understated, almost to the point of being dubious.) They cannot convince the world of her royal identity without winning over the Dowager Empress, Anastasia's grandmother, who is played by Helen Hayes. Although her co-stars know how to dominate a screen, Hayes steals the show with force of character and biting delivery of lines such as, "If the firing squads were such poor shots it's amazing the Revolution succeeded." When she finally breaks down and pulls the mystery woman to her heart, it's evident that she wants to accept her as family just as much as Bergman wants to be so accepted. The ending implies that such human ties are stronger than doubt or history.
In both these films the protagonists start out with an unclear sense of identity and pretend to be someone they think they might be. The imposture is not an act of cunning. It's more like a bit of flotsam to which they cling for dear life until others help them to self-discovery.
*See the Index by date for a list of other films in this month's series.
Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
