Joan Crawford is in a darkened mansion, following the sound of a buzzer. Barely perceptible under that sound is an electronically distorted voice saying the name of her character: “Lou-eeeze…” Could it be the invalid woman she once tended to as a nurse has somehow come back from the dead? Or is somebody gaslighting her?
In a way, Crawford is gaslighting herself in 1947’s Possessed, as she is experiencing hallucinations resulting from worsening schizophrenia. This is a melodramatic noir that frequently feels closer to horror than anything, making it a melonoirror.
It opens in Los Angeles, where she dazedly wanders sparsely populated streets early one morning. She goes up to various men asking them about David, mistaking a man exiting a church for the person for whom she’s looking. That guy isn’t as confused as I was, as Crawford is made up in this scene to appear as if she isn’t wearing any makeup at all. It is a strange sight to see her like this, somebody who once said of her own immaculate presentation in public at all times: “If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”
Soon, an ambulance is whisking her up the curving drive to L.A. County Hospital, presumably because a woman in public not wearing makeup was considered ground for committal in the psych ward back then. There is an interesting perspective shot from her point of view when she’s wheeled in on a gurney, making the audience feel just as confused as her character. She’s lying face-up in a bed, unresponsive and unblinking, as day crossfades into night. Doctor Stanley Ridges gets her talking about who she is and how she came to be there. The taciturn Crawford says, “I’m not going to tell you everything.”
It would just be silly to do otherwise, as we will need several flashbacks to get her entire story, starting with how she was a nurse for wealthy businessman Raymond Massey’s bedridden wife. I found it interesting we hear that invalid woman but never see her, bar a brief glimpse of her drowned body later, when detectives fish her out of the lake the house sits upon. Also, Massey is more genial in this picture than I have ever seen him before, my burned-in mental image of him being his turn as the vicious Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace. He will even bashfully propose marriage to Crawford some time after his wife’s passing. She startles him and the viewer by breaking out into laughter: “I either had to laugh or cry, and I’m through with crying.”
You see, she is still obsessed with Van Heflin, an engineer working for Massey who is into her, but not enough to put a ring on it. Admittedly, she is a bit too clingy, telling Heflin, “I want a monopoly on you.” Also: “’I love you’ is such an inadequate way of saying, ‘I love you’. It doesn’t describe the way it hurts sometimes.” He, on the other hand, is committed only to his work, condescendingly correcting her when she dares call a parabola a “curve”. Crawford is right when she counters with: “I’m a lot nicer than a girder and more interesting.” If only she could find the perfume he wishes existed: “Now, if they turned out something like wet hair after swimming, that would be something.” Not even real-life perfumer Demeter makes that, and they have scents available which include glue, dirt, clean windows, kitten fur and the smell of a freshly opened can of tennis balls.
Maybe the problem is she should be younger, as Heflin does take an interest in Geraldine Brooks, playing Massey’s daughter. The age discrepancy between Heflin and Brooks would be alarming enough, but she actually looks underage. I’m surprised he ever noticed her, given a scene where she won’t stop bawling her eyes out eye at her father’s wedding to Crawford, and Heflin won’t stop eating long enough to acknowledge her. But once he does hazard a look…oh, boy: “Let me take a good look at you. You haven’t grown very much but…in other ways…you have.”
Not even her marriage to Massey, or Heflin’s interest in Brooks, can fully dissuade Crawford from her obsession with her crush, despite him being a complete asshat. Heflin is even openly rude to her, telling her on his return from a job in Canada: “Usually one of the nice things about going away is coming back. Usually, not always.”
Her fixation, and his rejections, are worsening her schizophrenia, a topic I’m surprised a major studio would touch at the time, albeit in a way which grossly simplifies the nature and treatment of such an illness. Still, it has such effective scenes as a horrific incident we’re not aware at the time was entirely in her head. Then we see what appears to be the same thing about to happen again and we are initially uncertain whether this will be the same fabrication spooling out a second time, a variation on that, or if we are seeing the real thing. It makes us empathize with Crawford in a manner similar to that early scene where we see the trip from ambulance to examination room from her perspective on the gurney.
The performances in Possessed are solid all around, but none is more surprising than Crawford. I never had any doubts she would be up to such a role, but it is so strange to see her so pitiful and needy. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the picture isn’t her decision to play somebody who is mentally ill, but that she is made to look as if she isn’t wearing any cosmetics in the opening scene. Crawford may bare her soul, but the real shock is her baring her face.
Dir: Curtis Bernhardt
Starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray