Spellbound -> Yoda? →[More:]OK, so I just watched Spellbound, the so-so Hitchcock thriller with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. It was sort of a blow-off for Hitch because David O. Selznick had just been through psychoanalysis and wanted a film on the topic, and even though Hitch hated the idea, he was under contract. Then Hitchcock used Dali paintings to portray the inner mind of Peck and Selznick hated that. Still, it has its moments and Ingrid is as always luminous. And there's a great shot of the long-lost Penn Station.

Isn't she the secret of Sweden's cheap energy?

Anyway, I couldn't help but be charmed by Michael Chekhov's psychologist character, a perfect German-accented Freud knockoff. But halfway through I realized there was something familiar.

As hinted, I think he could be a model for Yoda. There's one exchange in particular:

John Ballantine: That Freud stuff's a bunch of hooey.
Dr. Alex Brulov: Oh, you are a fine one to talk! You have a guilt complex and amnesia and you don't know if you are coming or going from somewhere, but Freud is hooey! *This* you know! Hmph! Wiseguy.

that seemed very similar to:

Yoda: Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Now, obviously, very little of the actual story or dialogue could have carried over. But it's almost as if Lucas could have storyboarded (and had Frank Oz practice) by playing Chekhov's scenes. He starts off seeming like a simpleton, then turns out to be an observant and canny mentor. He even prods Peck with the butt end of his pipe, just like Yoda does with his cane.

Or I could be off base here, and Chekhov is just tapping into a type and Yoda is based more on the type.