Rhonda Fleming in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound plays a violent nymphomaniac with light/dark sides to her personality.  It's a small role near the film's beginning; she's escorted by a male orderly to the psychiatrist's office.  On the way she flirts with him.  They walk through alternating shadow and light.  In response to her suggestions, the man smiles, looking forward almost at the camera.  He thinks something will occur between them later, maybe late at night, but she switches moods like an appliance flying off a kitchen shelf during an earthquake.  She rips her fingernails across the back of his hand.  Their against-regulations date will not happen. 
     Her psychiatrist is played by Ingrid Bergman, wearing glasses, speaking in an accent we associate with old world European shrinkdom.  Rationality emanates from her like heat waves seen in sunlight.  Her calmness presses against the unstable battiness of Fleming's character.  The psychiatrist will later work with a man (played by Gregory Peck) troubled by death-haunted dreams.  Bergman's character will go on an emotional ride before the movie's end, as Hitchcock puts even his most stable character, the psychiatrist, through hell, making her opening encounter with the nymphomaniac a warning of turmoil to come.  The scratches on the orderly's hand tie in to Peck's character's recurring dream images of parallel lines.  Thus, does Hitchcock take a dramatic moment (the hand-scratching by the nymphomaniac) and use it as a symbol of the psychological eruption characterizing the film's mystery of a man whose waking self knows nothing while his unconscious perceives the truth of his problem. 
     Not bad for a filmmaker regarded by many as primarily an entertainer. 
     Spellbound is for me a good example of a Hitchcock movie I don't like as an overall watching experience.  Once everything gets explained in the latter parts I've lost interest.  The psychiatrist's explanations of her handsome patient's dreams, aided by visuals designed by Salvador Dali and theremin music, seem too easy to me.  Dreams aren't that clear cut.  In my life, anyway, they tend to make sense mostly in thematic terms rather than as specific answers. 
     The film's early scenes and the developing mystery of Peck's character's dreams, however, are alive and also strange.  A mental hospital, head doctors, an orderly wanting to fuck a patient, violence committed by a mentally ill woman, the soothing words of professionals trying to make things seem normal, putting glasses on beautiful Ingrid Bergman to give her a Ph.D. look, and a weird music score, make Spellbound worth at least one viewing, if you haven't seen it.

                                                                              Vic Neptune