Pop Culture 101 - SPELLBOUND

Spellbound's immediate influence was seen in a spate of psychological thrillers produced in the Hollywood in the late '40s, including Shock (1946), with Vincent Price; Whirlpool (1948), starring Gene Tierney as a kleptomaniac; and Caught (1949), with Robert Ryan, Barbara Bel Geddes and James Mason.

The film was adapted to radio for the Lux Radio Theater in 1948, with Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli (the latter currently starring in Selznick and Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, 1947) in the leads.

The film's crisply shot dream sequences inspired later filmmakers, most notably Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1965; Rosemary's Baby, 1968), to create dream sequences that looked more like dreams than the conventionalized Hollywood approach of earlier films.

The successful recording of Spellbound's score created a new source of revenue for Hollywood films, the soundtrack album. It was also one of the first film scores to be turned into a piece of classical music, Miklos Rozsa's "Spellbound Concerto" for piano and orchestra.

Rozsa's use of the theremin to mirror Gregory Peck's character's mental problems influenced later film composers, who would use the electronic instrument, particularly in science fiction and horror films. Notable scores to use the instrument include Dimitri Tiomkin's for The Thing From Another World (1951) and Bernard Herrmann's for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

Rozsa's score inspired the young Jerry Goldsmith (The Omen, 1976; L.A. Confidential, 1997) to write music for the movies.

Spellbound was remade for television as a one-hour drama on the anthology series Theatre '62, starring Maureen O'Hara as Dr. Peterson and Hugh O'Brian as J.B.

The film's DVD version, released as part of the Criterion Classics collection, includes a simultaneous commentary by Hitchcock scholar Marian Keane; a short film, "A Nightmare Ordered by Telephone," on Hitchcock's work with Salvador Dali, a 1973 interview with Rozsa and a recording of the film's radio version.

by Frank Miller