Possessed - 1931

Possessed (1931) marked a turning point in Joan Crawford’s early career.  In one stroke, she transformed from playing devil-may-care flappers to playing tough, sadder-but-wiser women.  The giddy 1920s were over in 1931, and the rough decade ahead required gals made of sterner stuff.  Though she plays a kept woman in this movie, and therefore “possessed,” she is really self-possessed, choosing a life for herself on her own terms.

Directed by Clarence Brown (see more on Brown in this previous post), the film is a kind of rags-to-riches story more than it bears any moral fallout for a woman choosing to be a mistress rather than a career woman or wife.  This was the Pre-Code era, after all.  Like many films of this period, there is an unflinching depiction of modern life, both in the hardscrabble mill towns of the Great Depression and in Park Avenue society.   Survival in both realms requires a certain degree of cynicism.

We begin with the shrill reckoning of a factory whistle, and a swarm of slow-moving, sweaty-faced workers leaving the plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, and one of them is Joan.  It’s a paper box factory, and Joan is restless, tired of living in poverty, of “buying happiness on installment.”  She’s also tired, perhaps, of Wallace Ford, a concrete worker looking to get a big contract to settle himself in business.  He wants to marry her, but Joan wants more.

In my favorite scene in the movie, she pauses to watch a train slowly pull into the depot by the factory, with the giant smokestacks and industrial jungle as a backdrop.  The train is a magic carpet to anywhere else.  

She looks into the train windows and sees many life scenes in tableau—cooks preparing food, a maid in uniform ironing her lady’s unmentionables, a scantily clad woman preparing her toilette, a couple in evening clothes, slowly dancing to a photograph.  

At the end of it, is a charming drunk man played by Skeets Gallagher, also in evening clothes, hanging off the end of the lounge car, martini glass in hand.  He strikes up a conversation with Joan, amused by her, and playfully warns her away.

He offers her a sip of champagne.

Back home, Joan’s mother, played by Clara Blandick, whom you’ll remember as Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz, is a careworn woman, angry at Joan for having her head turned by a wicked city fellow.  They fight over Joan’s desire to get away.  “If I were a man it wouldn’t frighten you,” she tells Ma, that she would be expected to go out into the world and get ahead, to get what she wanted.

Joan leaves the dirt of the factory town behind, goes to Park Avenue, New York City, finds the charming drunk man, now with a hangover, who does not remember her.  He wants her to go, but she has no place to go and wants suggestions.

“The East River is full of girls who took advice from guys like me.”  She wants to know how to get away, and he says she needs a rich man to help her but does not infer that he is that rich man, and offers, “Never tell them anything.  A man likes to think he’s Christopher Columbus discovering America.”  He is flippant but speaks with authority.

Two gentlemen appear, one of them in Clark Gable, who is a wealthy lawyer bent on a political career.  Joan does a little sneaking around to get to meet him.  She is warned away by Mr. Gable’s colleague, played by Frank Conroy, and charges that she is obviously a gold digger, and they are not fooled. Joan, true to her bold and honest nature, is glad they see that she is a gold digger, that she wants to take up with a wealthy man.  “I couldn’t waste my time if you weren’t.”

Gable is amused by her, perhaps even charmed at this early stage. Mr. Conroy tries to nip this in the bud: “She’s only after your money.”

Gable glances at Miss Crawford.  “Are you?”

“Yes.”  When she leaves with Gable, she throws Conroy an over-the-shoulder look.

Gable takes her to an expensive French restaurant.  She is out of place, but not in over her head.  Gable remarks, “I like women who know what they want.”

One of the delightful and fascinating aspects to the movie is that here we have two very strong leads who both capture our attention because they are both gorgeous people with a powerful screen presence and equally comfortable in their characters and with each other.  There is no scene stealing and no reason for it.

We jump ahead in time and Joan is ensconced in her own apartment but spends a lot of time at Gable’s palatial flat, in which she is the acknowledged mistress of the house as well as Gable’s mistress.  She comfortably orders dinner off a French menu, directs servants with confidence, is dressed and coiffed like a society woman, and even Gable’s pals now admire her, even wonder why he doesn’t marry her.

Mr. Gable had been married before and he is sour on marriage, because his ex-wife was unfaithful to him. 

But he holds Joan Crawford in high regard; he loves her, respects her and is proud of her, is sensitive to insults against her.  Perhaps it is a Pygmalion and Galatea scenario. To protect his political image, Joan poses as a divorcee friend, but the charade is easily seen through by a cheap floozy whom his buddy Frank Conroy has picked up—and Gable is disgusted that Conroy would not only cheat on his wife, but cheat with such a lowly, tacky creature. 

Joan, classy gal that she is, is kind to her, but the floozy only notices, “You certainly picked yourself a swell sugar daddy.”

Mr. Gable kicks Conroy and his mistress out, offended by them both.  Joan, despite having the good manners to treat the woman in a friendly way, is humiliated.  Despite improving herself in education on the finer things, on gracious life, she will always be regarded as low class.  

Gable is upset for her sake, but she bucks up, and he likes that.  He admires her moxie; perhaps in part because it relieves him of ever having to save her disgrace by marrying her.

Joan’s old beau from back home shows up, Wallace Ford, now an up-and-coming concrete contractor looking for business in the big city.  He is stopping by to secure a paving contract.

There is a tantalizing, suspenseful scene where Joan tries to hide the portrait photo of Gable on her mantle, and Gable, who arrives, tells him to call for an appointment to discuss the paving contract.  He tells Gable that he wants to marry Joan at last, now that he is a successful businessman.

Protecting Gable, Joan goes to Coney Island with Wallace Ford—and Gable at last has the sense to get quietly jealous—and the amusement park montage includes a ride on the merry-go-round and the reaching for the brass ring to complete our allegory.  Joan rides a carousel horse side-saddle.

Gable is now running for governor of the state, but his friends refute his intention to at last marry Joan because no one would really be fooled.  “It’s a sad thing to see you give up a brilliant future for a woman like that.”

Joan overhears, sneaks out of the apartment, pretends to reenter, and picks a fight with Gable.  When he says he wants to marry her, she says she is going to marry Wallace Ford, saying that he is her own kind.  Gable calls her a tramp and slaps her.

Gable need not worry about Joan’s nuptials; when Mr. Ford finds out she was Gable’s mistress, he responds, “I wouldn’t have you.”  He is disgusted by her, but he recants when he realizes his contract with the state is on the line, he offers to marry her if she fixes it.  Joan kicks him out.

The class warfare, the self-sacrifice, the struggle of an ex-gold digger to think of herself as anything else culminates in a convention scene where Gable makes a speech (against joining the League of Nations because we should mind our own business—we’ll be sorry for that), and a smear campaign hits the hall with questions and accusations about his mistress. 

Joan is there, watching Gable be heckled, and she defends Gable, leaving in tears. 

Back out in the rain, marching, broken-hearted and embarrassed through the city streets, Joan passes a line of campaign posters with Gable’s portrait on them, as if they are flickering messages to taunt her.  She climbs the steps to the El, and just before fadeout, Gable catches her.  They are together again, win or lose.

It is a very different kind of film from the other movie she made with the same title in 1947, which we discussed here last week.  It’s fun to watch Joan Crawford’s films from different eras and see how much she reflected the contemporary image of women.  Unlike many other actresses, historical pictures didn’t seem to fit Crawford’s style.  She was a woman of the twentieth century, hard-edged, realistic about restrictions placed on her, but stoically staring them down.  Triumph didn’t always mean winning; frequently it meant only having the strength to endure.  She had one of the most enduring careers in Hollywood.

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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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My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

 

Clarence Brown - Director and Automotive Engineer

Clarence Brown, respected movie director during Hollywood’s glamour’s heyday, had a different career as a very young man.  How much influence the manufacturing city of Chicopee, Massachusetts, had upon his future choice of career in during the short time he lived here is unknown and probably negligible, but it is intriguing to observe how the fledging movie industry and the fledgling auto industry ran a parallel, and interdependent, course. 

Mr. Brown, before he ever knew what movies were, was employed by the Stevens-Duryea auto manufacturer in Chicopee.

Brown was born east of Chicopee in the town of Clinton, Massachusetts, in 1890.  The turn of the 20^th century fast approaching, a menagerie of new innovations in science and art, and especially in new inventions, burst forth in such a stream of imagination that many qualities of the next century would find their prelude in this very decade. To narrow it down a little, both automobiles and moving pictures had their impetus in this frenetic decade called the Gay Nineties.

Both cars and movies have come to mean a great deal to us, and certainly to Clarence Brown.

While Brown was a small child, Frank and Charles Duryea were tinkering with their experimental gasoline-powered horseless carriage, the prototype for which was supposedly designed in their boardinghouse on Front Street in Chicopee. It didn’t take long for the auto industry to be off and running. The Overman Wheel Company in the section of town called Chicopee Falls was one of the country’s many new automobile factories; they were producing cars as early as 1900.

The men who designed and produced these marvelous machines were considered to be wizards of technology, dreamers, and rugged individualists. Clarence Brown may have fit into this mold, for surely he was a unique young man. Intelligent and gifted, he was allowed special permission to attend the University of Tennessee when he was only 15 years old.

While he studied engineering there, the threads of his future destiny were already forming for him thousands of miles away. In 1907, while Brown was away at college, the Duryea firm back in Chicopee contracted with the J. Stevens Arms plant in Chicopee Falls to produce their cars.

Stevens Arms company, postcard, Image Museum website, public domain

The following year the first movie theater in Chicopee opened. It was called the Gem, and it was located around the corner from the Stevens plant on Main Street. Any connection between these two newborn industries was unapparent at the time, and would even be to Brown at first.

His father, Larkin Brown, had run a cotton mill in Massachusetts, but when Clarence was a boy, the family moved south where his father continued in cotton textile manufacturing.  His father hoped that Clarence would go into the family business, but after graduating with two degrees at only 19 years old, the remarkable young man decided to follow his passion at the time—which was the new automobile craze.

He first went to Illinois to work at an automobile plant there, but soon came to Chicopee and the Duryea company around 1910.

Industry in the manufacturing town of Chicopee was diversified and booming at this time. Any number of products were produced here then, from foodstuffs to bicycles to clothing. Though we may think of the opportunities presented to the thousands of skilled and unskilled laborers who came here for work as represented by the huge influx of immigrants from Europe and Canada, Chicopee also became the proving ground for any number of professionals and “bright young men” who began their careers here.  One of them was Clarence Brown.

The Stevens-Duryea 1905 model

While Brown was working at the Stevens-Duryea auto plant, two more moving picture theaters opened up in the city. It would be tantalizing to think that Brown’s future fame as a director was born in a dark theater in Chicopee, but we’ll never know. Surely any interest he might have discovered in the flickers was put to the back of his mind, for about 1912 he left Chicopee. 

1912 advertisement

Brown is quoted in Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By…, “I became the traveling expert mechanic for Stevens-Duryea.  One of my calls was to a dealer in Birmingham, Alabama, who took a liking to me, and he set me up in a subsidiary company, called the Brown Motor Car Company. I had the agency for the Alco truck, the Stevens-Duryea, and the Hudson.  It was around this time—1913, 1914—that I became interested in the picture business.”

His favorite flickers at the time were produced by the Peerless Company, and Brown left Alabama and his business, and became an assistant to Maurice Tourneur, one of the directors for Peerless, whom he always credited with being his greatest teacher and directing mentor.

Years later Clarence Brown’s own films played in the new Chicopee theaters: the Rivoli, the Wernick, the Willow, and the Victoria—“second-run” neighborhood theaters which Brown never heard of because they were built after he left Chicopee.

Brown directed Greta Garbo in Anna Christie and Anna Karenina and five of her other films. His film A Free Soul made a star of Clark Gable, and his National Velvet introduced us to Elizabeth Taylor.  He gave us The Yearling, The White Cliffs of Dover, and Plymouth Adventure before retiring in 1953. He was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award five times.

Brown died in 1987 at 97 years old. Talent and ambition in one field brought him to Chicopee, but he made his mark in that other new industry in Hollywood.  And where would “the flickers” be without car chases?

A previous version of this article appeared in In Chicopee (a publication of the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram, Holyoke, Mass.) 1992.

Sources:

Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… (University of California Press, 1976), pp.138-140.

Siegel, Scott and Barbara Siegel.  The Encyclopedia of Hollywood (NY: Facts on File, 1990) pp. 62-63.

Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican. September 19, 1937, p. 3E.

Thomas, Nicholas. Ed. International Directory of Films and Filmmakers: Directors, Vol. 7 (2nd ed. (Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1991), pp. 103-105.

Plymouth Adventure (1952)

“Plymouth Adventure” (1952) presents the Pilgrims in an unexpected kind of soap opera about the captain of the Mayflower lusting after the wife of future Governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford.

Any film about any point in history is bound to be lacking the complete story, possibly because there never is a complete story. History is a lot more chaotic than a movie script; things don’t tie up quite as neatly as we might wish. Sometimes the attempt to bridge the gaps often leads to complete fabrication, producing a movie that may not have very much value at all historically, perhaps not even as entertainment.

“Plymouth Adventure” invents some things, like the romantic triangle between the captain, and William and Dorothy Bradford. It disregards others, like the relationship the settlers had with the Indians. The Wampanoag are given short shrift, and their importance in helping the settlers to survive the first few winters is not even mentioned. The film ends even before what we call the first Thanksgiving. Despite this, it is an earnest attempt at dramatizing what was surely one of the most remarkable voyages in history.

Spencer Tracy plays the captain, a cynical, crude man of the sea who is contemptuous not only of his Pilgrim passengers but of people in general. Gene Tierney is Dorothy Bradford, the object of Mr. Tracy’s sarcasm, lust, and eventually, love. Van Johnson plays John Alden in a rather small role, and a young Lloyd Bridges is the ratfink first mate.

We might forgive the fact that the costumes are a bit too Disney-like and clean, and that there are no authentic accents employed. The dialogue is strong and sharp, with some great lines especially by Spencer Tracy, it is really his movie, but the dialogue is not at all the correct speech of Englishmen of that era. What the film does well is special effects, with a terrific replica of the Mayflower used, and a storm at sea that is truly scary. It is the first chink in the armor of seeing the Pilgrims as all pious and brave. This film is probably the first attempt to show them as businessmen, as opportunists, as jealous and fearful, as zealots, as human beings. It is remarkable that a setting with such inherent drama and turmoil should be so little visited by Hollywood.

Directed by Clarence Brown (whose transition from the automotive industry to motion pictures is mentioned in this 2007 blog post), the film attempts to shrug off the fairy tale aspect of the Pilgrims and gives us corrupt company sponsors of the trip, and a lot of bare-chested, barefooted sailors climbing the rigging to unfurl the enormous sails. There is excellent camera work, with some terrific deck-to-topsail shots. We are given a fascinating and somewhat funny demonstration by Miles Standish on the cumbersome and dangerous operation of the 17th century percussion musket.

We are also treated to a brief sampling of songs authentic to the era, including a scene when land is spotted as the Pilgrims burst into the song whose words come from the Henry Ainsworth Psalter, Psalm 100:

Shout to Jehovah, all the earth,
Serve ye Jehovah with gladness;
before him come with singing mirth
Know that Jehovah he God is.

It's he that made us, and not we;
his folk, and sheep of his feeding.
O with confession enter ye
his gates, his courtyards with praising.

Confess to him, bless ye his name.
Because Jehovah he good is:
his mercy ever is the same
and his faith, unto all ages.

You can listen to another version of the tune here.

But as the journey concludes, the story begins to focus on the captain and Mrs. Bradford, and their hunger for each other. It makes John Alden’s flirtation with Priscilla Mullins look like puppy love, despite that he is a lonely bachelor and she is the only adult unmarried female on the trip.

An especially dark ending involves the actual historic event of the death of Dorothy Bradford and the actual dispute as to how she died. Before the English settlers (to avoid confusion, not all the passengers on the Mayflower were Pilgrims), established their settlement, while the Mayflower was still safely moored in the harbor at Provincetown, Dorothy Bradford drowned.

Her drowning was noted in history as far back as Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia”, but in 1869, a story in Harper’s New England Monthly suggested she had commited suicide. Though much of this story has been discounted, there are continuing discussions as to whether she could have committed suicide.

What is interesting is that the film even hints at this controversy. It could have ignored it altogether for a more prim and pious, and uplifting ending. Bradford, played by Leo Glenn replies that she would not have done such an ungodly thing and is immediately comforted, though with never a strong effort to convince, that she must have fallen overboard accidentally.

To help us accept the Pilgrims as human beings, more authentic representation from that era could be employed, rather than viewing their story through a 20th century prism. Another song of the period, a sweet and almost mournful tune by Thomas Ravenscroft, not used in this film, takes us to emotions even Pilgrims felt, and without the use of 20th century screenwriter’s dialogue:

Canst thou love and lie alone?
Love is so disgraced!
Pleasure is best wherein is rest
In a heart embraced.

That they loved and lost, and lusted, and felt deeply about it should not come as a shock. At least Hollywood acknowledges that.

Perhaps it is unavoidable that the film may have the look of one of the Hudson River School of romantic impressionist paintings. Maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Part of telling a story is re-affirming what we already know, as much as it is an effort at imparting to us something we do not.

Aside from this film’s slight attempt to crawl out from the iconic image we have of the Pilgrims, I wonder if the reaction of Americans in general to this portrayal of the Pilgrims is anything as strong as the reaction of someone from Massachusetts.


Massachusetts possesses the Pilgrims and to some extent is possessed by them. These names of the characters in this film: Winthrop, Bradford, John Alden, Priscilla Mullins, Miles Standish, this is a roll call of the pantheon of icons of early Massachusetts history and are also the names which live among us today. Their descendents live here still, their names are on towns, schools, and it is possible to drive through Plymouth past the Miles Standish State Forest and stop in at the John Alden Gift Shop for a box of salt water taffy, and then head back to your room a block up at the Governor Bradford Inn. The pensive Pilgrim standing on the deck of the Mayflower II replica in Plymouth Harbor at the beginning of this post is not a Thanksgiving prop. These reinactors are with us the year round at Plimoth Plantation. (For more on Plimoth Plantation, see my post here from 2007 at my New England Travels blog.)

To watch this film and see John Alden portrayed by Van Johnson is more than a little startling and amusing to someone from Massachusetts. I imagine it could be likened to what a scholar of Greek mythology might react to him playing Zeus.

Something as basic as that can keep even a very good film from being taken too seriously. But then, no film should probably be taken too seriously anyway. For how many of us across this country is seeing our historical figures-cum-folk heroes brought to life in Technicolor by Hollywood’s latest hearthrobs an obstacle to making us believe?

The other thing missing in this film is turkey. Which reminds me…I’m about due to take the bird out of the oven. Happy Thanksgiving.

Clarence Brown - From Cars to Film

Clarence Brown became a Hollywood director in the days when being a Hollywood director had nothing to do with film school. An extraordinary industry in its early days; if a man purchased a camera he could be a director.

Born in 1890, with the turn of the Twentieth Century fast approaching, he came along in a period when a menagerie of new innovations in science and art burst forth in such a stream of applied imagination that many inventions, and many qualities of life in the next century would find their prelude in this decade. Both autos and motion pictures had their impetus in this frenetic period. Both would change the country and the world, and both were very important to Clarence Brown.

Brown grew up in Massachusetts and Tennessee, and his first profession was automobile manufacturing. He studied engineering at the University of Tennessee while only 15 years old. He graduated in 1910 with two degrees, and headed for western Massachusetts where the Stevens-Duryea company was building its own line of cars. After a couple of years with them, he left for Birmingham, Alabama to establish his own car plant, called the Brown Motor Company.

Only a few years later, he saw a movie being filmed in New Jersey, where a new interest, and a new career was born. He wrote, produced, acted in minor roles in a few early films, edited, and by the 1920s, began a long career as a film director.

Brown directed Greta Garbo in “Anna Christie,” “Anna Karenina” and other films. She reportedly called him her favorite director. His film “A Free Soul” made a star of Clark Gable, and his “National Velvet” introduced Elizabeth Taylor.

Brown gave us “The Yearling,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and “Plymouth Adventure” before retiring in 1953. He had been nominated for the Best Director Academy Award five times. The film industry seemed to be an arena of self-made men, and women, who remade themselves in one way or another, from their appearances, their names, their goals, and their destinies. Clarence Brown, whose intelligence and ambition could have marked him for success in manufacturing or any field, chose film. It’s quite a leap from manufacturing to the artistry of film, but perhaps there was something more than fascination with a new toy that drew Brown. Certainly the early days of film were equally entrepreneurial as artistic, and more than one businessman was lured by the prospect of getting in on something completely new. In his case, it was life changing.