A superb thriller, one of the first movies of Alfred Hitchcock I’ve ever seen. I saw it for the first time in a movie theater, which played the old movies only and the suspense was hanging in the air, the audience seemed to have stopped breathing at times. The movie starts with the arrival of the new head of the Green Manors psychiatric clinic, a famous doctor Edwards (Gregory Peck). The doctor is coming to take over from a retiring head of the clinic for 20 years, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll). The famous Dr. Edwards seems much too young to most psychiatrists in the clinic, but the young female doctor Constance Petersen(Ingrid Bergman) does not find anything wrong with that, she feels an instant sympathy for Dr. Edwards, she is actually drawn to him. However, almost immediately Dr. Edwards starts to exhibit a very strange behavior. He seems to be agitated by the lines made by a fork on the white linen cover during dinner, he faints during a surgery on one of the patients and he is not recognized by his own housekeeper. On the night of the surgery Constance is reading the book by Dr. Edwards and realizes that the signature on the book and the note she got from “Dr. Edwards†earlier that day don’t match. When “Dr. Edwards†wakes up she confronts him with this knowledge and he admits to her that he is not Dr. Edwards, but he does not know who he really is and he has a feeling he might have done something terrible to Dr. Edwards in order to take his place. The only thing he knows about himself is that his initials must be J.B., because they were engraved on a cigarette case he had on him. Constance does not believe that he could have done anything wrong. She thinks he is suffering from the guilt complex. She tries to persuade him to sit on a session with her to get to the bottom of this, but he leaves early in the morning, afraid of dragging her with him into the unknown and possibly into the association with the murderer. The housekeeper has already contacted the police and they raid the clinic, but J.B. is already gone. He does leave a note of the hotel he’ll be staying at in New York and Constance, convinced he can’t get well without her help, is joining him there. During an intense session, which caused J.B. to lose conscience again, they get the glimpse of whom he can be – possibly a medical student, who had some accident with his arm, it was clearly burnt. Constance decides to take him to her teacher in psychiatry, Dr. Alex Brulov, wonderfully played by Mikhail Chekhov. She introduces J.B. as her husband, but the good doctor figures out that he is dealing with the amnesia patient and immediately goes on guard against possible complications. The complications do arise as J.B. has one of his episodes after he sees the dark lines on the white wall of the bathroom at night, which causes him to take a razor and go downstairs. One of the most frightening and at the same time riveting scenes in the movie is when Dr. Brulov gives J.B. a glass of milk, while chatting to him incessantly in the background, and all this time you can see him through the slowly draining glass, and then there is nothing, black screen. Br-r-gh, scary… I think my heart was somewhere in my throat by that time. Next morning Constance is looking for J.B. and sees a slumped form of Dr. Brulov in the chair. Nobody like Hitchcock to play with the spectators’ nerves! Of course, the good doctor is ok, and he is confronting Constance about her “husbandâ€. The police was already in his house the day before and he advises Constance to give J.B. up to the police. She is begging him to give her a day to try a snap J.B. out of his amnesia. Meanwhile, J.B. wakes up and tells them about the dream he had that night. The dream is richly illustrated by Salvador Dali and tells about J.B. sitting in a club with the bearded man, while another faceless figure approaches them and starts reproaching the bearded man in stealing his job. Later, when J.B. and the bearded man are somewhere in another place in the open, the faceless figure seemingly kills the bearded man and throws something away. Both psychiatrists perceive this dream as a quarrel that happened between Dr. Edwards and another person, which J.B. apparently was the witness of. As a result of this session they are able to uncover the name of the place where J.B. has last seen Dr. Edwards, a ski resort where he and Constance go together and where he discovers that he, indeed, is not a murderer, but someone else is. However, the evidence is against him, he is tried and convicted. Exhausted and distressed Constance is returning to the Green Manors and in a conversation with Dr. Murchison, who remained as a head of the clinic after Dr. Edwards’ disappearance, she realizes who the real murderer is.
Fantastic suspense of the movie is keeping you on the edge of your seat all the time. I’ve watched it more than 15 times already and the thrill is still there. It is very much enhanced by the superb cast of the movie, Gregory Peck is incredibly handsome and vulnerable in the role of Dr. Edwards. Ingrid Bergman still very young and beautiful is very intense and riveting as Constance. Poor Leo G. Carroll had quite a share of bad guys roles in Hitchcock’s movies and this is one of them, but he is absolutely great as a cunning Dr. Murchison.
Also, one of the greatest attractions of the movie was that he was actually heavily relying on Zigmund Freud’s theory of dreams bringing the message from the subconscious to the surface and it was extremely interesting to watch the deciphering of J.B.’s dream based on Freud. All in all, this movie will definitely remain in the cinema history as one of the most wonderful examples of the genre.