"Spellbound," Alfred Hitchcock's surprisingly disappointing thriller about psychoanalysis, is worth seeing, but hardly more…. I felt that the makers of the film had succeeded in using practically none of the movie possibilities of a psychoanalytic story, even those of the simplest melodrama; and that an elaborate, none-too-interesting murder mystery, though stoutly moored to the unconscious, merely cheapened and got in the way of any possible psychological interest. To quite an extent the psychological pretensions cluttered up the murder mystery too…. There are some frightening shots of the kinds of striated whiteness which mysteriously terrifies the patient—the mark of forktines on a table cloth, for instance; the remembrance of the initial trauma is excitingly managed; and in one crisis of mental dereliction, in which the camera flicks its eye forlornly around a bathroom, you get a little of the unlimited, cryptic terror which can reside in mere objects...