It is Los Angeles in the early 1970s and the critic John Russell Taylor is driving around the San Fernando Valley, checking out the goods on offer at various yard sales. It’s usual for locals to put their bric-a-brac out on their lawns, hoping to raise some cash. What’s less usual, however, is the bounty that Taylor spots in one yard: a series of storyboard panels from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, a thriller about a psychoanalyst starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
Taylor recognises them straight away. He is a Hitchcock scholar, who will go on to write the director’s authorised biography. On closer inspection, he notices something else: that one of the panels depicts the film’s famous dream sequence, and seems to have been drawn by a different artist to the others; a world-renowned surrealist who was hired when the sequence was first conceived as a 20-minute showstopper rather than the three-minute segment it ultimately became. Among the stack of nine storyboard drawings Taylor purchased that day, he walked away with one that was most likely drawn by Salvador Dalí himself.
