Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir, Possessed.
DVD Review
Possessed, starring Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Warner Brothers, 1947
Most of the time film noir, especially crime noir out of the 1940s-1950s be-bop night, will get heavily involved in plot, and twists in plots and leave the question of motivation, deep motivation for the “shrinks.” After all if the medium is the message as the communications guru of a long-gone era, Marshall McLuhan, used to argue then the message in these things is nothing but the old saw that crime does not pay, does not pay for anyone if you watch enough of these noirs. So it was kind of refreshing, if somewhat odd, to see a film like the film under review, Possessed, where a deep look at the motivation for a crime, the mental anguish over the act, and the clash over good and evil inside the individual get a work out.
But wait a minute. Don’t get too immersed in the prospects for a deep study of the human psyche under duress because the motivation for a crime here, murder, is nothing other than the reaction of a lovesick, thwarted woman, a woman scorned if you like. This is Hollywood after all. So you can almost see, even before the act, the gun rising steadily in her hand. And that is what the plot-line here revolves around. How that gun got steadily into her hand to kill her blasé ex-lover.
See Louise (played here in a half- glamorous, half-maniacal way via flash backs by Joan Crawford) was hopelessly in love with a returning upwardly-mobile ex- GI, David (played here by a caddish Van Heflin), who was driven more by the prospects of an engineering career than by romance. When he called the whole affair off Louise fell to pieces. Well kind of fell to pieces because in reaction she had only one thing on her mind-get her man back, come hell or high water.
That hell or high water involved marrying the boss, the well-off boss (played by Raymond Massey), once his wife (who Louise had been acting as a nurse for) committed suicide although it was clear from the start that she still carried the torch for David. When David, who in the meantime had been working for her newly-minted husband, fell for his young daughter and planned to marry her Louise went over the edge. And over the edge, as I have already telegraphed, meant that sweet little equalizer, the revolver.
The way that the story unfolds as flash-backs while Louise is in a state of mental deterioration in the psycho ward of a mental hospital is how we get that deep look, using the now crude but then state-of-the-art 1940s psychiatric understanding of mental illness. That is what makes this one a cut above the- run-of-the-mill melodramatic 1940s noir (although there are more that enough melodramatic moments, especially between the relentlessly unhinged Louise and relentlessly heartless David). But when you think about it, even though Louise winds up in a psycho ward rather than the chair, crime still doesn’t pay. Right?
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