Possessed (1947)

Possessed (1947)

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt

Screenplay by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall

Runtime: 1 hr, 48 min

It’s no secret that our own judgments and perceptions can be flawed.  This is especially true regarding how we perceive our own conditions and personalities.  We don’t see when we are acting cruelly or giving mixed signals, as what we mean to say is clear to us.  Even if we can see the same problems in others, finding them in ourselves is another story entirely.  Throw in some mental instability and the endeavor is nigh impossible.  Throw all of that on the screen, and you get this week’s movie, Possessed.

Possessed begins with a confused woman named Louise (Joan Crawford) wandering the streets of Los Angeles, repeating the name “David” to passers-by.  Brought to a hospital psychiatric ward and prompted by Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges), Louise spits her story in flashback.  She was a nurse under the employ of one Dean Graham (Raymond Massey) to care for his ailing wife.  More importantly, she was madly in love with a man named David Sutton (Van Heflin), who broke off their relationship.  Simply put, Louise would do anything to keep David with her.  This sort of thing cannot end well.

When we first see Louise and David together, they are at a house across the lake from Graham’s summer home.  It is at this point that David wants to break things off, and their relationship is established expertly.  Crawford’s voice is particularly upbeat as she dresses, but Heflin shows that David’s thoughts are not with Louise; he is clearly more focused on the music he’s playing than his lover.  As David breaks the news, the tone becomes increasingly awkward, the silences more frequent, and Crawford’s delivery more desperate.  Her later madness is made understandable in this scene.

Further, this scene foreshadows the excellent performances in Possessed.  Crawford shifts from being confident and happy to visibly holding back the tears to mentally unstable with fluidity, to the point that what her character feels at any moment can only be described as “muddled”.  Her excellence extends to her scenes in the hospital, where the fatigue on her face is palpable and confusion is pronounced yet restrained.  The work that Crawford put into studying the behavior of mentally ill patients is evident, and it pays off in spades.

As for the men in her life, both Heflin and Massey succeed in their very different portrayals.  Heflin brings a degree of impersonal calculation to his character—appropriate, considering his obsession with mathematical engineering.  He appears level headed, but it hides a tinge of unknown unkindness.  Massey, on the other hand, gives Graham a justified level of dignity, but there’s the feeling he’s suppressing some emotions, especially after proposes to Louise a year after his wife dies.  It’s the same sort of performance that made Massey shine in Abe Lincoln in Illinois and the saving grace of The Fountainhead.

Crawford is the star, however, and it is her character that drives things.  What is being driven, however, is not always clear—but this is to the film’s benefit.  First of all, the story is told via the flashbacks of a character that clearly is not all there.  The doctor himself notes that Louise is very vulnerable to suggestion, and while he doesn’t apply it to her spiel, one need not tax the imagination to believe the whole story, which the doctor is prodding, is in doubt.  All we can say with certainty is that she did in fact marry Dean Graham; the rest would require some investigation.

Even within the flashbacks, however, the difference between perception and reality is front and center.  Despite being a nurse who can clearly see Mrs. Graham is mentally ill and imagining things which aren’t so, Louise is unable to see the same problems in herself until explicitly told.  A five minute sequence, in which Dean’s daughter Carol (Gerladine Brooks) tells Louise that David knows that she killed Mrs. Graham, is completely false and detached from reality.  Of course, whether Louise is even having these delusions is debatable; she claims to see Mrs. Graham, but the audience never does.

Possessed, then, makes for an interesting look at perception, delusions and other psychological phenomena.  Oddly, though, the explicit psychology that Dr. Willard delivers is the one stumbling block of the film.  The flashbacks are interrupted periodically for the doctor to make his diagnoses.  Not only is this distracting to the story, but also it is delivered with such conviction and certitude that it’s pretty damn laughable.  It most reminds me of the last five or so minutes of Psycho; surely this must have sounded better on paper.

Psychobabble aside, Possessed proves to be an intriguing drama which, in its own way, forces one to reconsider the way in which we perceive the world around us.  How open are we to the suggestion of others?  Why is it that we see the flaws in others so clearly, yet can’t find those same problems in ourselves with a GPS?  This is not a film that provides answers to those questions—after all, it is a movie, not a psychology textbook—but we cannot seek out the answers unless we know the questions to ask.