Title: Possessed (1947)
Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Screenwriter(s): Sylvia Richards & Ronald MacDougall
Producer: Jerry Wald
Distributor: Warner Bros.
In Theaters: July 26th, 1947
Run Time: 108 minutes
Starring: Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks
Genre(s): drama/film-noir/thriller
Storyline: A dazed woman walks the streets of Los Angeles looking for a man named David. After collapsing in a diner, she’s taken to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. Flashbacks reveal her obsession for David as a result of borderline personality disorder which ultimately leads to murder.
Movie Trailer:
My Review: I’ve only ever seen one other Joan Crawford movie, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and then it was Bette Davis who stole the show. Robert Osbourne explained before the movie began that this movie is by far Ms. Crawford’s best performance. Having only seen one other movie I cannot say I agree with him definitively but I’m inclined to believe anything Robert Osbourne says. He is the expert when it comes to classic movies.
It starts with a seemingly “possessed” woman, wandering the streets, looking for David. It’s not 100% certain who Steven is, for all we know it could be her son, but if you watched this on TCM then you’d know who he is from Robert Osbournes introduction. Steven is a man our main character is hopelessly in love with. So much so it triggers in her a paranoid schizophrenic state. She will do anything, even murder, to get him. Her role as a calculated woman turned woman on the edge is brilliant. It is said she spent a long time learning all she could about mental patients and had a doctor who specializes in trying to cure the mentally ill, work with her. Joan Crawford, I’m sure, was a perfectionist when it came to getting down the emotions of her characters. She gave her all on this performance, and I’m sure in her others as well.
The way she is able to manipulate people, everyone except David of course, and also the way she’s able to convince herself, is great. You find yourself feeling for her on a human level then, almost just as suddenly, hoping she gets what she deserves. I honestly cannot seem to understand how a man can drive a woman to such lengths of madness but I guess it was common then and it’s no different now. My only other issue I had with this movie was how it ended. I must give you a little history of the storyline in order to explain myself better. She is a caretaker to an older, sickly woman. This woman (whom we never actually see, just hear her annoying voice) has a husband, who she fears is having an affair with her nurse, and a daughter, who believes anything she tells her (namely about her fathers alleged infidelities). Once it is established that the elderly woman “committed suicide,” Louise (Joan Crawford) ends up marrying her patients newly widowed husband, in hopes of making David jealous. She also manages to make the daughter like her. It isn’t until much later, when she discovers that David and the daughter intend on marrying that she really goes wildly insane. I won’t give any spoilers away but she ends up recounting practically her entire life story for a doctor at a mental hospital where she was taken after she was found wandering around the streets in search of David. My issue is, once her story is told and her husband finds her at the hospital, he is told the diagnosis and is taken to see her. When he asks the doctor to leave so he can have a moment alone with his psychotic wife (who I still believe killed his first wife, although he explains to her that it couldn’t have been her) I expected him to kill her! I think that would have been a “WOW” ending. Maybe that’s just me.
Have you seen this movie? What did you think of it? What’s your favorite Joan Crawford movie (if you’ve seen any of her countless others)?
My Rating: B
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