Possessed Reviews

Possessed sees something very strange for a Joan Crawford film: she flagellates herself into emoting and actually giving a performance instead of relying on star power and stubbornly going through the motions with campy élan. That doesn’t mean that Possessed is free from campy histrionics from the star, but she creates an interesting portrait to work with her theatrics, mostly. The film also comes with striking noir-esque visuals and a script that has insights into the maddening nature of unrequited love.

Crawford stars as Louise, a woman with a fraught connection to reality throughout the film, who is in love with David, Van Heflin, but marries Dean, Raymond Massey. Dean is the husband of the sick woman that Louise takes care of. David is the neighbor who she’s madly in love with, and who likes her but this relationship is just a stop-gap for him. Geraldine Brooks is Dean’s daughter, a college-age girl who hates and distrusts Louise and has been nursing a school-girl crush on David. It’s a love triangle mostly; since Dean plays no real role in most of the proceedings once he’s married Louise and helped create a fractured, terse relationship between his daughter and her new mother.

Van Heflin does a credible job as the homme fatale of Crawford’s obsessive, needy and desperate affections. He is aloof to her, more tolerating of her adoration and constant attention than giving and warm like he is with Brooks. And Geraldine Brooks provides good support, capable of being both bratty and snotty and charmingly coquettish depending on what character she is interacting with. And then there is Crawford.

Joan Crawford was practically a drag queen version of herself. What else could possibly explain the melodramatics and steely bitch demeanor that she brings to the final scenes of the film? Or the hallucinations that pepper the film, which she showcases by looking strained and rubbing her forehead while the makeup people apply a copious amount of sweat to her brow? That’s something close to camp for the ages. But there are other moments, moments where she delivers something more original and engaging. Moments where the life and light and her eyes recedes and she looks out at the world with a hunger that can only be described as animalistic, feral even, and sometimes that hunger screams out “OSCAR!” but mostly it’s just her steeling herself and every emotion into delivering a performance with grit and bite. She goes colorfully mad, wears no makeup (how shocking that is for a woman who refused to act her age and face the reality of aging) and invests us with all her might in her oneiric film.

The film is flawed whenever we have to sit through the wraparound hospital scenes (much of it ham-fisted dialogue delivered with shrugs and obvious insincerity by the actors), and often dips into campy hysterics more than it probably should. But so what? There is the central performance from movie star Joan Crawford, a performance which probably should have won her the Oscar instead of Mildred Pierce. Her sanity throughout the film is suspect, but once David leaves her for the younger, prettier step-daughter you know all hell is about to bust loose. And whenever we’re dealing with her descent into madness, Possessed engulfs us in its own way.