Selznick’s psychiatrist became the technical advisor and Ben Hecht, always on the producer’s advise, was hired to write a very unfaithful adaptation whose various drafts had to deal with censorship requests (there was a list of forbidden words, for instance “sex menace”, “libido”, “frustrations” and “tomcat”). Edwardes, a 1927 psychological thriller written by Francis Beeding (joint pseudonym for two British autors, John Palmer and Hilary A. Hitchcock, who was under contract with Selznick since 1939 (but didn’t get on well with the producer who in fact had already happily loaned him to other Studios different times) proposed to make something out of a book he owned the screen rights titled The House of Dr. Selznick, who had been “on the couch” in early 40’s after winning two Oscar in a row with Gone with the Windand Rebecca. The idea for a psychoanalysis-related film first came to producer David O. “Just another manhunt story wrapped up in pseudo-psychoanalysis” that’s how Hitchcock called his 1945 thriller Spellbound, the first of his three collaborations with Ingrid Bergman also starring a young Gregory Peck, a classic Hitchcockian movie, a love story disguised behind the “manhunt” story with an innocent man accused (though this time he thinks to be guilty) and ordinary people facing an unusually dangerous situation. SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve never watched this movies before, this is your last chance to go and fetch a copy, otherwise you’ll read this article at your own risk… Spellbound – 1945 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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