Possessed (1947) starring Joan Crawford presents a mixture of dreamlike quality and cold, hard, and even bitter reality. There are times when her character seems to skillfully navigate these realms, and at other times is only helplessly tossed in the unexpected currents between them. In some scenes, we don’t know where she is in control and where she is not, and that is perhaps the most interesting facet of this film and points to Crawford’s real skill as an actress.
This is my entry into the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “A Haunting Blogathon: In the Afterlife.” See more great posts from these terrific bloggers here.
The movie begins in a fog (or smog)-shrouded Los Angeles with Miss Crawford stumbling in a trance on lonely city streets in the twilight. She appears without makeup, emotionally wounded, whimpering the name “David,” like someone lost, searching. She is almost somnambulant but perks up when she sees men who might be David, but turn out to be strangers, and she is in an agony of sorrow and worry. These are real city streets, and we’ll note that in the scenes set in actual locations, Joan Crawford’s state of mind is weak and confused, but on the artificial soundstage sets, she is in full command of herself. At least at first.
When she enters a drugstore (add this to our collection of movie drugstore scenes), she collapses and an ambulance is called. She is whirled through the real Los Angeles into a real Los Angeles hospital, rolled on a gurney through endless halls where our viewpoint is only the ceiling, with bright lights above and the faces of interns and nurses leaning over to peer at us. An ER doc leans right into our face with his light. Joan, and we, are ordered to be taken to “psycho.”
The Psychopathic Department is kept behind locked doors and Crawford’s room has windows on the bars, so for a moment we are taken back to the nightmare years when mental illness reduced one in the eyes of society to that of an animal—but this post-war noir captures an era where curiosity about mental health led to progressive, if admittedly slow, changes. We see a grim, tired, elderly doctor, played by Stanley Ridges, take on Joan as a patient, with a young doctor to learn—and to whom he can spout medical jargon and plot exposition.
As he gives her an injection of some psychotropic drug, he prods her to talk and we are inevitably launched into our first noir flashback. There are, of course, several.
David is Van Heflin, a self-possessed scamp and free spirit, the kind who doesn’t like to be tied down—at least not by Joan Crawford. They enjoy a cozy evening in his lakeside cabin, as he plays a Schumann piece for her on the piano. He is an engineer with a gift for mathematics, clearly educated in the arts as well, but down to earth enough to be wryly dismissive of whatever bores or does not serve him. Joan, whom he feels is smothering him, is beginning to fall into both categories. Like many men of his generation, and certainly enough of them in noir films, he is jaded by the war. “Blame it on the army, blame it on the war, blame it on anything you like,” he says as to why he wants to break up with her. She doesn’t accept the explanation.
We may be both sympathetic and impatient with Miss Crawford, as we see early on her need to cling to him. He wants to go away for good, and she is heartbroken. Yet, she is not helpless. Not yet. The scene shifts and we see she is actually a nurse, on private duty to a wealthy man’s invalid wife. The man is played by Ramond Massey. He appears enigmatic at first, but will later show infinite patience and mercy.
The wife is demanding, accusing, and we may feel we are being set up for somebody wanting to knock her off to get her out of the way.
Unfortunately for Joan, Van Heflin continues to have a connection to her through Raymond Massey, when Mr. Massey, spending the summer with his invalid wife in a nearby lakeside home, hires him for an engineering job in Canada. In a moment alone with Heflin, we are jolted by the shift in her personality from a competent nurse, crisp and efficient, to a suspicious, screaming and somewhat nutty woman accusing Heflin of seeing another woman.
We are wrenched back to the psych ward and Doc Stanley Ridges proclaims she has split personality with a persecution complex. We dive back into another flashback.
Massey’s wife has drowned in the lake beside their vacation home. Police drag the lake in the nighttime for her body, which is found. At an impromptu inquest held in his home, the death is proclaimed accidental, as the woman liked to walk near the water, and was felt to be despondent. Interrupting the proceeding is a teenage girl and a small boy. They are Massey’s children, who have been away in boarding school. The daughter, played by Geraldine Brooks, accuses Joan Crawford of killing her mother. Her mother’s letters to her were full of accusations of Joan carrying on with Mr. Massey behind her back.
As with any good mystery or noir, there are these such incidents that pop up that make certain people look guilty, and then certain other people, and then we’re not sure we can trust anyone. Geraldine Brooks plays a not-too-dissimilar role here as she played in Cry Wolf, also made in 1947 (covered in this previous post) – that of a sensitive, somewhat mercurial young woman at first angrily spurning and then being drawn with needy affection to an older sister-type newcomer to the fold. She had a lovely quality of being believably earnest and making us concerned over her walking a tightrope between making wise decisions and foolish ones.
But we are immediately distracted by the prospect that Joan could have bumped off her patient, though she seems to have no yearning to be with Mr. Massey and become Geraldine’s new stepmother. Ah, but Mr. Massey wants her to stay and take care of his little son. Then he wants her to be his wife.
Did he bump off the missus to have Joan?
Joan is still seething over the reappearance of Van Heflin in her life when he is hired by Massey and comes to confer with him in his richly wood-paneled study about drilling for oil in Canada. Just as the oil and coal industry today and its minions decry solar and wind power in a jealous competition for profits, Heflin and Massey joke, “Here’s to oil and down with atomic energy.”
Joan taunts Heflin when he treats her with sly civility but otherwise has no interest in her.
She tells Massey she is quitting her job now that the invalid is dead—she knows she needs to get away from Heflin—but he abruptly asks her to marry him. She laughs a little hysterically—more a sign of her increasingly brittle mental health than rudeness, but she accepts and acknowledges she does not love him. Mr. Massey here begins an extraordinary role as a humble, kindly, and gentle husband who counts himself lucky to be with her.
He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to kill anybody. Did he kill his wife?
Geraldine is told of the coming nuptials and is not happy, but she concedes to Joan that her father told her how sick her mother was, and that her death was not Joan’s fault. Joan, in a patient and magnanimous gesture—or maybe just looking for an out—declares she won’t marry Massey if Geraldine doesn’t want her to, and that makes Geraldine feel bad. They make up, and we have another shift in the story.
The wedding reception is in the Massey’s mansion, and who arrives but Van Heflin, glib, confident, and apparently relieved Joan is somebody else’s problem. With his smart-aleck greeting to her frosty one, we have to wonder if he’s back just to tease her, and if his cynical charm hides a mean streak. He comes upon Geraldine Brooks. She remembers him from when she was a little girl, actually having proposed to him when she was eleven. Van is amused and interested and—uh-oh, Geraldine might be getting a little serious. We will discover soon that Van is getting serious, too.
Joan is furious and warns Geraldine to stay away from Van, but not out of motherly concern. She’s still obsessed with him, and in the sane moments when she’s on the arm of her husband as the new lady of the manor, we might briefly forget the depth of her obsession. But something happens again, even a small look or gesture, and she beings to spiral into angst and fury.
In a very complicated and fascinating sequence, Joan, having
left a concert hall after Van Heflin shows up to join the flirtatious Miss
Brooks, and now alone in the mansion on a dark and stormy night, the tension from
her obsession with Van Heflin manifests itself in hallucinations. The clock is loudly ticking, driving her
nuts. Van brings Geraldine home, and after
her laughing, “We fooled her, didn’t we,” Joan confronts her. Geraldine is cold with her again, and again
accuses her of killing her mother to be with Massey, and Joan shoves her down
the stairs, killing her.
Joan is shocked, frozen at the sight of Geraldine’s body crumpled at the foot of the stairs below.
Suddenly, the front door opens and Geraldine enters, home from the concert. The entire previous scene happened only in Joan’s mind. She’s losing it, and Geraldine is sweet to her, is concerned about her, but does not know what is wrong. Joan knows what’s wrong.
She’s cracking up.
Sent to a medical doctor by Massey, she is defensive and walks out of the office, but confesses to Massey that his first wife is haunting her. Massey takes charge and brings her back to the lake house so she can face her torments and all the creepy shadows there. At one point left alone, crying, she walks toward the camera, walking toward the door buzzer that seems to call her, “Louise…” It sounds like bandleader Alvino Rey’s “Stringy” steel guitar talk box. “Looo-w-e-e-z-ze…” The sound stands your hair on end, and suddenly this movie has morphed from a film noir to a mystery to a horror film. Joan screams, and Massey comes to the rescue, comforting her, demonstrating that his first wife’s ghost is not here.
She wails that she is afraid, and confesses that she killed his first wife, helping her to commit suicide. It’s a powerful scene by Joan as she breaks down and cries. Massey tells her she wasn’t even there when his wife drowned. Joan was in the village on her night off.
Joan is relieved but amazed she had nothing to do with the death, and thanks him profusely, and we sense that they might have a happily ever after ending with a genuinely consoling marriage. Massey takes her to dinner and they are prepared to enjoy themselves at last—but wouldn’t you know it, Van Heflin’s there at the restaurant with Geraldine. They are engaged.
He is just as uncomfortable seeing Joan as she is of seeing
him; her obsession for him has at last made him awkward rather than dismissive.
Joan gets pointedly chatty, non-stop, laughing, trying too
hard, and the others notice. When she is
alone with Geraldine, she urgently tries to warn her off Van. To Van she remarks, “I told you once I’ll do
anything to keep you and I will.” She
has turned from begging to threats.
Massey, meantime, wants to get her some psychiatric counseling, but she accuses him of wanting to put her away.
She drops in on Van, this time with a gun. She uses it. But she does not say, “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” instead she says, “You’re not going to marry her. You’re not good enough for her.” True that.
Back to the psych ward with kindly Doc Stanley Ridges again,
and she mumbles “David,” and then, “I killed him! I killed him!”
Doc meets with Massey and discusses the long work of her
recovery. Joan is not responsible, he
says, for her actions, but does not know if the jury will agree. It is a new world of understanding of mental
illness, a glimmer of light among the noir shadows. Raymond Massey will stand by her, and see her
through whatever happens.
Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, it’s a film of skillful twists
and turns. Joan Crawford soundly delivers
one of the best performances of her career, turning manic, angry, fearful,
sorrowful, and desperate in a tour-de-force of closeups that reveal a
vulnerability she perhaps preferred to conceal in other movies with broader,
more theatrical performances.
As many film buffs know, this was not her first movie called
Possessed. We might call it Re-Possessed,
as the first film, from 1931, quite different in tone and topic, featured Joan
Crawford playing opposite Clark Gable.
There she is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks gaining a position
in high society in the wicked city as Gable’s mistress.
We’ll talk about that next week.
Have a look at more posts in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s
“A Haunting Blogathon: In the Afterlife” from
these great bloggers here.
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
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