Possessed (1947)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m not a big Joan Crawford fan (I’ve made my choice in the Davis-versus-Crawford feud), but it’s hard not to be impressed by the performance she gives in classic film noir Possessed, and by the overwhelming bleakness of the film surrounding her. The framing device has a woman (Crawford) telling a doctor about the events that have landed her in a psychiatric help facility, the film going through a multi-year dramatic story. There’s a very noirish sense of fatalism to the events, as Crawford’s character goes to the end of her murderous crush on a man. The story is told with admirable fuzziness, blurring the lines between subjective recollection of a troubled mind and the descriptive realism that was Hollywood’s mainstream style at the time. No less than Van Heflin and Raymond Massey play the two men with polar relationships with the protagonist — one of them she loves and who doesn’t in return, the other she doesn’t love even though he does. While conceived as a psychological drama rather than a crime film, the dark ending and sombre cinematography mean that Possessed has been included with some fanfare in the film noir corpus. It’s not a bad pick — and much of that credit goes back to Crawford herself.