By comparison, Bette Davis, Crawford's career-long rival, did her share of campy performances in campy films, but even those less familiar with Classical Hollywood still generally remember her as one of the screen's great actresses. Conversely, only hard-core movie buffs recognize Crawford's abilities and are aware of the fine work she did late in the silent era and throughout the 1930s and ‘40s.

Possessed (1947) has Crawford playing a nurse suffering from, apparently, encroaching schizophrenia. Audiences who can think of the actress only in those modern terms described above would, I suppose, have a field day enjoying what they imagine to be scenery-chewing Crawford going hog wild.

But that turns out not to be the case at all. I'm not a Joan Crawford fan, but I found myself impressed by her almost clinical portrayal, one that's disturbing to watch not because Crawford is so "out there" as she was in many of her later movies, but rather because it's so creepily accurate. I've known my share of mentally disturbed individuals, including several with schizophrenia and, for the most part, her performance captures their illness dead-on.

The movie is also generally good, though it suffers a bit trying to be all things to all people. Possessed is both a psychological drama and film noir. At times it's almost a horror film while in other ways it's trying to be a glossy Joan Crawford vehicle and an A-list Warner Bros. release. Not all of these components come together, but Possessed was a much better movie than I was expecting.

A woman (Crawford) from Washington D.C. is found wandering about downtown Los Angeles. In a café, her catatonic stupor alarms several customers, and she's whisked away to County Hospital's Psychopathic Department. Cared for by sympathetic Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges), she tells her story in flashbacks.

Louise Howell had been employed as a nurse by wealthy Dean Graham (Raymond Massey) to look after his troubled, mostly bed-ridden wife, heard but never seen by the movie audience. Louise is madly in love with carefree bachelor David Sutton (Van Heflin), but he enjoys playing the field and is in no hurry to settle down and get married. He breaks off their romance but the increasingly paranoid Louise can't contain her desperation to hold onto him, somehow. Dean sends David off on an engineering job in Canada and Louise, in her emotionally unstable state, becomes convinced that he's run off with another woman.

Later, Dean's wife drowns, perhaps murdered by Louise as a ploy to bring David back. An inquest rules the death an accident, and when a returning David again refuses to resume his relationship with Louise, she abruptly agrees to marry the lonely widower instead.

Over time, Louise seems to find satisfaction and mental stability in her marriage to Dean, even reconciling with his adult daughter, Carol (Geraldine Brooks), who at first believed Louise was only interested in her father's money. But when David reenters the scene yet again, this time finding lasting love with Carol, Louise's mind again unravels.

Until the mid-1940s, mental illness was more or less a taboo subject, excepting, of course, the kind of madness commonly seen earlier in horror movies, noir, and gangster films. Up until then, mental illness was almost never portrayed as a treatable medical condition. John Huston's famous documentary Let There Be Light (1946), about shell-shocked and depressed soldiers, was banned outright by the U.S. Army and largely unseen until the 1980s. And just as the term "cancer" was almost never used in pre-war Hollywood films (and rarely after), serious depictions of mental illnesses (and their treatment) only began appearing in earnest after the war.

For 1947 audiences, Possessed must have been awfully unsettling, for both those unaware of the existence of schizophrenia as well as those with friends or relatives suffering from the affliction. Crawford and director Curtis Bernhardt reportedly spent many hours visiting psychiatric wards and talking to doctors to ensure her accurate portrayal. Oftentimes such claims are nothing more than studio PR, but in this instance there's little doubt Crawford studied up. (Too much, as it turned out. Apparently the pair witnessed an electroshock treatment only to be sued by the patient's family for their invasion of privacy.)

Except for a few scenes of prolix, movie-type dialogue, Louise's growing paranoia and persecution complexes, and her inability to distinguish the real from the imaginary are all frighteningly authentic. Possessed works best when it tries to get inside her head. In several scenes the audience hears voices and sees things that only later are revealed as emanating from Louie's sick mind. In contrast to the entertaining but highly stylized imaginings in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Bernhardt uses film language to fool the audience as well as Louise into thinking they're seeing and hearing things that aren't really there. Joseph Valentine's cinematography further enhances this in several high points: subjective camera angles as Louise lies on a gurney being wheeled into the hospital at the beginning, and later in a startling hand-held shot, a long take, as Louise wanders a dark house searching for what she imagines is the ghost of Dean's first wife. (Hand-held shots like this were extremely rare at that time.)

The question of whether Louise murdered the first wife is also admirably ambiguous for most of the film. The drowning is never shown, only its aftereffects. Later, Louise confesses to Carol that she murdered the woman, but gradually the audience realizes that perhaps even that vividly described action was only imagined.

What damages Possessed slightly has nothing to do with Crawford's performance, but rather what seems to have been the studio's unease with the material. It was an expensive film for the time, costing $2.6 million, and both the posters and some parts of the movie suggest a typically lush Joan Crawford vehicle rather than a sympathetic but clinical look at mental illness. Louise's relationship with Carol bears some resemblance to Mildred Pierce (1945), Crawford's first Warner Bros. movie, a critically acclaimed and popular comeback hit for the actress, and which shared some of the same crew. DVD Savant, in his review, intriguingly suggests it plays like Barbara Stanwyck's backstory in Double Indemnity.

Possessed is usually pegged as film noir, but it's equal parts medical drama, romance and, in Louise's hallucinations, even threatens to become a horror film, somewhat anticipating similarly ambiguous films like The Innocents (1961). Franz Waxman's score, though undeniably colorful, is a bit overemphatic at times, but generally Possessed impressively holds everything in check. The other performances are all good, especially Van Heflin's. He plays a character neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but rather simply amoral. David enjoys spending time with Louise, but drops her like a hot potato when she threatens his promiscuity. He's polite and even sympathetic to a point, but absolutely unwilling to make any changes to his own life to accommodate her illness.

Video & Audio

Possessed is presented in a good high-def transfer preserving the film's black-and-white cinematography and 1.37:1 screen shape. The image is sharp to the point where the freckles on Crawford's face are plainly visible. The DTS-HD 2.0 mono (English only, with optional English SDH subtitles) is excellent throughout save for part of one reel that sounds like a secondary source was used. This is a pressed Blu-ray and not a BD-R, and the disc is region-free.

Extra Features

Supplements are all culled from a 2005 DVD release: an audio commentary by Drew Casper; the featurette "Possessed: The Quintessential Film Noir"; and a trailer.

Parting Thoughts

Interested parties might want to read DVD Savant's (who appears in the featurette) point-counterpoint review, in which he largely dismisses Crawford's "movie psychosis" as "an awkward hoot." But I rather liked Possessed and, to my surprise, felt Crawford did a fine job. Highly Recommended.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His credits include film history books, DVD and Blu-ray audio commentaries and special features.