1947 Directed by Curtis Bernhardt
After being found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, a severely catatonic woman tells a doctor the complex story of how she wound up there.
うしなわれたこころ, La Possédée, Posedlá, Hemmungslose Liebe, Amor que mata, Poseída, La possédée, Megszállott, Anime in delirio, 失われた心, 포제스트, Fogueira de Paixão, Одержимая, Çılgın, 作茧自缚, 作繭自縛
USA
USA
USA
Crawford cranking up the cray cray quotient to eleven. Sometimes you incessantly buzz the help-the-batty-invalid-upstairs buzzer, and sometimes the help-the-batty-invalid-upstairs buzzer is incessantly buzzed at you.
Possessed is a frustrating watch, one that gets more so the more time one spends thinking about it. On one hand, it's a fairly serious examination of mental illness that doesn't blame the sufferer for either their behavior or their affliction. On the other, however, the story is so deeply rooted in men as the saviors of wayward women and keepers of medical knowledge — something which of course is neither recognized nor addressed— that it's hard to give it the credit it probably deserves for its attempts to engage with Louise's mental illness.
Related to the above issue is the fact that, from what we are shown, much of the pain experienced by Louise (Joan Crawford) is linked to…
No one does lunacy, jealousy, or staring dramatically though windows in the rain like Joan Crawford.
“Go ahead and kiss me, you don’t have to mean it.”
It has been said that on screen I have personified the American woman. This is probably because from the time of Mildred Pierce I was cast, in picture after picture, as all varieties of her...the woman tremulously mature...sometimes so bruised by love she sinks into the psychotic, as in Possessed and Humoresque…
—Joan Crawford, A Portrait of Joan
Following the success of Mildred Pierce and Humoresque, in her third major film for Warner Bros, Crawford dives headfirst into the mind of yet another tortured woman made mad by love. Only this time, she is diagnosed for her mental malady—in that way, it’s maybe the maddest of all the roles…
This was a real tearjerker by the end. Joan Crawford plays a nurse "on the outside looking in" as her affair with Van Heflin falters, an engineer more in love with parabolas than romance. Her obsession with him fuels this melodrama, but her mind begins to take a turn for the worse when her employer's invalid wife commits suicide, believing all the time Crawford was having an an affair with her husband (Raymond Massey) when she actually wasn't. Occurring simultaneously with the emotional strain of her break-up, the seeds of Crawford's own twisted delusions are planted, making Possessed a powerful look at the mind of a schizophrenic.
One thing that impressed me is how Crawford plays off of her co-stars.…
1st Curtis Bernhardt
And we're back on the Thesis Train with another 'reading around the subject film', this time relating to the final segment of my murderer chapter. Concerned with notions of gaslighting of mentally ill/disabled women as being dangerous, I thought it would be useful to have an example of a film where instead of there being doubt about the woman's mental state, their instability and propensity to cause violence is front and centre narratively. And considering one of these sixties films stars Joan Crawford, what better choice than a melodrama from her heyday?
Of course, calling it a melodrama does the film something of a disservice, because it's far more of a generic hybrid than you might initially…
There is a scene early on in Possessed where Joan Crawford is committed, for an unspecified sickness and collapse (hello plot) into a "Psychopathic Department" in a hospital. This is one of the more subtle clues in Possessed. The film is a rampant melodrama, the melo overwhelming any film noir pretensions. However, this is not especially a complaint, as I love a good melodrama and Joan Crawford is as good as they came for these hysterical roles.
Crawford earned an Oscar nomination for this performance, and while it is hugely over the top I quite liked it; she has a range of ridiculous scenes to play, her character is amazingly inconstant, but she nails almost all of them, with the…
Arguably Joan Crawford’s best performance and my personal favorite of hers. This RULES and I give it the highest of recommendations to anyone wanting some more Joan Crawford or fantastic noirs in their life
I developed a little baby crush on Van Heflin last year after watching Shane and got Possessed on DVD from the library since it's one of his better known movies (typing this reminds me that I should see if my library has Johnny Eager on DVD...) When Possessed showed up, I read the description and was put off by Crawford's character having schizophrenia and being violent. I was worried Possessed was going to be very stigmatizing of mental illness and use schizophrenia as a reason for murder like so many other crime movies. While this movie is certainly not perfect (and does use the stereotype that people with schizophrenia are violent) it reminded me quite a bit of another Crawford…
