Superb and quite mad, Possessed gives us Joan Crawford at full hatstand, eyes boggling, jaw tight, fists clenched, a portrait of an unhinged woman, a stalker before the term was coined. This melodrama from 1947 comes from a time when they knew how to do this sort of thing unapologetically.
It opens calmly but oddly enough. After big, blaring, noirish opening credits we’re on city streets at dawn, where a discombobulated lone woman (Crawford) is stumbling about looking for someone called David.
She’s clearly in the midst of some kind of breakdown and winds up in hospital, in the Psychopathic Ward, in a catatonic state. The doctor, after opining that there’s a lot of this sort of thing about right now and it must be something to do with society – he probably means why won’t women get back into the kitchen now the war is over and the men are back – administers a shot of something.
And Louise, for that is her name, begins to talk, sketching out in flashback how she wound up in this entirely distressed state.
In short it was a man – Van Heflin as David – a structural engineer with whom Louise had an affair. She was in love with him, or so she says, but he didn’t reciprocate those feelings. Worse, the more Louise protested her love for David, the less attractive he found her and the more he was convinced she’s was unhinged.
The film takes place almost entirely in flashback, pausing occasionally for the kindly doctor to administer another shot of sodium pentothal, or some other truth drug, at which point the camera shimmers and we’re back in the past, where Louise is making a massive hash of everything and then making it progressively worse.
Though everyone in this movie is a bit mad, the women get it worst. There’s Mrs Graham, the clinically depressed woman for whom Louise works as a private nurse, until Mrs Graham commits suicide by drowning, after which Louise marries widower Mr Graham (Raymond Massey), a rich man who also employs David on one of his construction projects.
And there’s Carol Graham, the daughter, who is operating on the hysterical register from the moment she enters the story. Though you haven’t seen anything until Louise catches wind of the fact that young Carol – barely out of school – and David are now secretly liaising, though he’s much older than her.
It’s as if someone had put Rebecca (Louise is the second Mrs Graham) and Mildred Pierce (older woman in existential struggle with younger one) into a cement mixer and let them churn.
Is Louise also a murderer, and killed Mrs Graham Mk I? It is suggested it’s possible, or it may be just part of Louise’s malignant state of mind – in the middle ages she’d have been labelled as “possessed”.
Logic is not in play – though Louise is clearly nuts from first minute to last, no one around her, except David (and he hasn’t grasped the half of it) can see it.
This is melodrama in a nutshell – character follows plot, regardless of where it goes.
Neediness is ugly and Crawford shows us just how ugly. Her performance as the abject Louise is spectacular – she gurns, she screams, she throws herself to the floor. You have to hand it to her. Would any other actress of the era have gone as far as this (Bette Davis to one side)?
Van Heflin is unusually good as David. So often wan, this time out he is rakish and devilishly charming, playing David as a playboy with the requisite steely edge beneath the veneer.
Geraldine Brooks, in her debut, is determined not to be outshone and puts in a piss and fire performance as the headstrong, sexually precocious Carol. What man could resist, is the idea, and with Brooks’s performance that comes across loud and clear.
Raymond Massey’s role is as a placeholder for rich but but otherwise inadequate men – he has a wife and loses her, and then marries the nearest woman under his nose, though Louise makes it quite clear she doesn’t love him and is doing it for the paycheck. He wants Louise because he wants a wife and she’s near to hand.
That runs as a theme through the whole film. “How American it is to want something better,” says Carol cheerfully to David at one point as he ogles a passing cigarette girl in a club. It’s a strange line – as if in air quotes around air quotes – considering David has a hot, pretty 17-year-old (ish) on his arm.
Everyone wants it all. Everyone gets it all. Everyone except Louise. Poor Louise. In this post-war era of sudden excess she doesn’t get her heart’s desire. And it drives her insane.
Possessed – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
