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Believe me, someday you're going to be glad you're rid of me
Half an hour from the end of last night's movie, as the protagonist returned uneasily to the partly derelict lake house where she had once served as nurse to the fretful, jealous, invalid wife of the Canadian industrialist who was now her much older husband, I finally diagnosed the problem with Curtis Bernhardt's Possessed (1947). If you guessed from the previous sentence that this film's rightful genre is the Gothic, you would be correct. And if you suspect that no genre was ever improved less by the addition of state-of-the-art late-Forties psychobabble, then you know more than the screenwriters.
My feelings toward Possessed are more sorrow than anger. It could so easily have worked. The plot takes two classic Gothic tropes—the Byronic demon lover and the uncertain marriage, complete with haunted homes and a husband who may or may not be concealing a dreadful secret—and interweaves them into a racheting nightmare into which the sanity of Joan Crawford's Louise Howell progressively dissolves, quite realistically when it's not being explained in outmoded Freudian terms by the paternal, infallible psychiatrist interrogating a dissociative Louise in the Los Angeles psych ward of the frame story. The cinematography and often the action has the translucent, dreamlike quality of much film noir, with the mise-en-scène doubling for the protagonist's mental state, but it's wilder, lusher, more capital-R Romantic than the high-contrast expressionism of noir. I have yet to see Crawford in a role where I find her as interesting as some other actresses of her era, but I have enjoyed her acting in movies such as Jean Negulesco's Humoresque (1946) and David Miller's Sudden Fear (1952) even when I felt the writing let her characters down1 and she is wholly committed here, playing both madness at a high theatrical register and realistic disordered thinking with no more dramatic tells than sentences that don't seem quite congruent with the situation and a thousand-yard stare that returns whenever she doesn't have anything to distract her. Raymond Massey is cleverly cast as Dean Graham, Louise's wealthy employer who's barely closed the inquest on decades of grim marital fidelity before he's proposing out of nowhere to his late wife's beautiful but penniless and insecure caretaker: on the one hand he's touching and softer than usual as the older widower regarding his romantic chances with more than a little self-deprecation ("It isn't very easy for a man my age to kiss a woman with dignity—I'll need practice"), but on the other the audience will recognize him as Citizen Chauvelin and Black Michael and Jonathan Brewster and while you want him to be genuine, with that saturnine, cadaverous look you can never be quite sure. His daughter Carol, played by Geraldine Brooks in her screen debut, insinuates coldly that Louise's presence in the house is replacing not only mother but daughter. Was his wife's drowning death a suicide? With Raymond Massey, your options are basically Abe Lincoln or villain. Meanwhile Van Heflin is sly, sour, and loiteringly sexy as David Sutton, the womanizing engineer whose casual dismissal of Louise after the first intense affair of her life knocks her into a decaying emotional orbit. "I've never had anything in the whole world I ever wanted, except you . . . I just can't go back to being on the outside of people's lives looking in," she protests, to which he gives a world-weary sigh: "Louise, we're all on the outside of other people's lives looking in. You wouldn't like being on the inside of my life, anyway—there's nothing there but a few mathematical equations and a lot of question marks. Darling, I honestly think we'd better not see each other for a while." A rake like they made them in Hogarth's day, he switches seamlessly from his fragile ex-lover to her college-aged stepdaughter, drinking steadily all the while; the more time the audience spends with him, the more his cynical charm is revealed as corrosion, his caustic wit as actual hostility. Technically he gets most of the script's best lines, but after a while they lose their playfulness and begin to sound like red flags: "My liver rushes in where angels fear to tread . . . Her money is an obstacle—so I intend spending it just as rapidly as possible . . . I seldom hit a woman, but if you don't leave me alone, I'll start kicking babies." Either man could furnish a Gothic narrative on his own, but merging their plotlines is what really sends Louise off the rails, as the anguish of not being "lovable" enough to make David stay finds its explanation in the conviction that she must have done something monstrous to forfeit his affections, something unforgivable, like murdering a lonely man's wife in order to take her place and make the man of her dreams jealous enough to come back to her as he swore he never would . . .
And then the psychobabble rolls back in. Possessed works hard to build a sumptuous, seasick mood of unreliable perception and unstable memory, in which Louise can hear the voice of the first Mrs. Graham calling to her from the electronic blare of an intercom or the cold, black, lapping waters of the lake and the audience shouldn't be able to guess which version of Carol coming upstairs after an evening at the opera is the real one until they're both done speaking, but every time we cut back to the white-clad hospital staff saying things like "Typical schizoid detachment" and "Do you notice the beginning of the persecution complex?" the whole thing just folds up and falls over like a broken deck chair. It even has the five-minute psychiatric monologue to wrap up all loose ends at the finale. I can't explain it. You want a Gothic, then you let people have their brooding and their tortured gestures and their psychotropic weather. You don't slap labels on the melodrama. It makes the characters look silly; it makes the film look like it doesn't trust itself. Constantly yanking the audience out of Louise's perspective into the critical, clinical reductions of her (badly dated) diagnosis breaks not only our immersion in the story but our identification with Louise, especially when the effect of these analyses is to diminish her further from an individual heroine to a type specimen, a "beautiful woman—intelligent, frustrated . . . It's always the same. A problem of some kind—simple, perhaps, but she was unable to cope with it. And now this," where this is near-catatonia from which only drugs and men's insistent voices can rouse her to tell her tale. I can imagine a movie which played with this effect deliberately: the protagonist envisions her life at a Gothic pitch of romance and suspense, the reality is that she's just ordinarily, mundanely overreacting and reading too much into things. I don't think the script for Possessed is that clever. I don't believe it's trying to anticipate The Snake Pit (1948), either: the music which accompanies the wrap-up monologue is too heroic. When Stanley Ridges' Dr. Willard delivers the sententious verdict that "this civilization of ours is a worse disease than heart trouble or tuberculosis," we are almost certainly expected to agree. I'm not saying the filmmakers did wrong in making a modern Gothic, but I couldn't help noticing that the plot could have withstood a period treatment with almost no alterations—Dean might have needed to make his money in steel or railways instead of oil, but David's ambition to build a bridge with a particular parabola is timeless and Louise's successive jobs as nurse and governess to the Graham family are almost retrograde in the film's contemporary, postwar setting. Her fear of being institutionalized by her husband would have translated naturally to the age of Bedlam and we might then have been spared the weirdly Christian and frankly horrifying characterization of psychiatric treatment presented by Dr. Willard to a worried Dean: "It was pain that made her this way. Only through greater pain and suffering beyond belief can she get well again." I don't care who the filmmakers consulted with, my grandfather got his PhD in psychology in 1947 and he never once tried to persuade me that getting mentally healthier had to be literal hell or it wouldn't work. Remind me to avoid your therapists like the plague, Los Angeles County Hospital.2
Maybe my feelings toward this movie are more anger after all. Everyone's behavior in Possessed is psychologically plausible, but you wouldn't know from the way the supposed experts discuss it. It makes a great framework for a woman to suffer within, but I maintain the protagonist was doing just fine on that front without professional help. So as with many badly flawed works of art, I end up treasuring fragments of this movie more than the movie itself. The way Van Heflin looks like a hot librarian in the nerd-heavy horn-rims that David wears at his drafting table; the way he gets one genuine moment of shock and empathy in his last confrontation with Louise and otherwise leaves the picture as he entered it, an A-1 asshole who really has no idea what he's taking lightly. Raymond Massey slouching in from a fishing expedition in a windbreaker and a hat fishhooked with fly lures, clumsier and gentler in his craggy body than I have ever seen him; because he proposes to her not five minutes after David has rejected her yet again, she laughs almost in Dean's face and he reacts with some embarrassment but without anger, which is perhaps why she decides to marry him after all. Joan Crawford's nearly-no-makeup in the frame story—intended to demonstrate how despairingly she has let herself go in her mad search for her demon lover—showed me instead what an interesting face she had: lean-boned, strong-jawed, her most expressive features her sensitive dark brows and her silently searching eyes. As soon as we flash back to happier days when she wore powder and lipstick and eyeshadow like every well-balanced woman, she looks much more like herself in photographs, which means much more conventionally attractive.3 I like the point-of-view shot with which Louise enters the hospital, sliding beneath signs and ceilings and reflecting lights and the nostril-first faces of a pair of ER nurses, who speak over her quickly and professionally—I believe them, even if the ward they abbreviate as "Psycho" stands for "Psychopathic." "One manic, three seniles, six alcoholics, and ten schizos." I like quite a lot of the flashback sequences until the psychobabble interrupts. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film blow its own kneecaps off in quite this fashion before. This curate's egg brought to you by my recovering backers at Patreon.
1. I have positive memories of her Flämmchen in Grand Hotel (1932), but I haven't seen the film since high school. It was my introduction to its entire cast. As a result I always think of Lionel Barrymore as a sympathetic character rather than Mr. Potter, but once I found out that Buster Keaton had been seriously considered for the part of Otto Kringelein, I wanted that branch of the universe so much more.
2. On top of everything else, this film squarely hits my MENTAL HEALTH DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY button.
3. My favorite photograph of Crawford was taken by George Hurrell and is the unretouched version of a portrait for Laughing Sinners (1931); it is the only reason I know she had freckles, which were otherwise hidden with cosmetics and the painstaking predecessors of Photoshop. I couldn't see them even in her washed-out scenes in Possessed, so I assume she was wearing minimal makeup after all. I hope her freckles featured at least once in a movie. I think they're great.
My feelings toward Possessed are more sorrow than anger. It could so easily have worked. The plot takes two classic Gothic tropes—the Byronic demon lover and the uncertain marriage, complete with haunted homes and a husband who may or may not be concealing a dreadful secret—and interweaves them into a racheting nightmare into which the sanity of Joan Crawford's Louise Howell progressively dissolves, quite realistically when it's not being explained in outmoded Freudian terms by the paternal, infallible psychiatrist interrogating a dissociative Louise in the Los Angeles psych ward of the frame story. The cinematography and often the action has the translucent, dreamlike quality of much film noir, with the mise-en-scène doubling for the protagonist's mental state, but it's wilder, lusher, more capital-R Romantic than the high-contrast expressionism of noir. I have yet to see Crawford in a role where I find her as interesting as some other actresses of her era, but I have enjoyed her acting in movies such as Jean Negulesco's Humoresque (1946) and David Miller's Sudden Fear (1952) even when I felt the writing let her characters down1 and she is wholly committed here, playing both madness at a high theatrical register and realistic disordered thinking with no more dramatic tells than sentences that don't seem quite congruent with the situation and a thousand-yard stare that returns whenever she doesn't have anything to distract her. Raymond Massey is cleverly cast as Dean Graham, Louise's wealthy employer who's barely closed the inquest on decades of grim marital fidelity before he's proposing out of nowhere to his late wife's beautiful but penniless and insecure caretaker: on the one hand he's touching and softer than usual as the older widower regarding his romantic chances with more than a little self-deprecation ("It isn't very easy for a man my age to kiss a woman with dignity—I'll need practice"), but on the other the audience will recognize him as Citizen Chauvelin and Black Michael and Jonathan Brewster and while you want him to be genuine, with that saturnine, cadaverous look you can never be quite sure. His daughter Carol, played by Geraldine Brooks in her screen debut, insinuates coldly that Louise's presence in the house is replacing not only mother but daughter. Was his wife's drowning death a suicide? With Raymond Massey, your options are basically Abe Lincoln or villain. Meanwhile Van Heflin is sly, sour, and loiteringly sexy as David Sutton, the womanizing engineer whose casual dismissal of Louise after the first intense affair of her life knocks her into a decaying emotional orbit. "I've never had anything in the whole world I ever wanted, except you . . . I just can't go back to being on the outside of people's lives looking in," she protests, to which he gives a world-weary sigh: "Louise, we're all on the outside of other people's lives looking in. You wouldn't like being on the inside of my life, anyway—there's nothing there but a few mathematical equations and a lot of question marks. Darling, I honestly think we'd better not see each other for a while." A rake like they made them in Hogarth's day, he switches seamlessly from his fragile ex-lover to her college-aged stepdaughter, drinking steadily all the while; the more time the audience spends with him, the more his cynical charm is revealed as corrosion, his caustic wit as actual hostility. Technically he gets most of the script's best lines, but after a while they lose their playfulness and begin to sound like red flags: "My liver rushes in where angels fear to tread . . . Her money is an obstacle—so I intend spending it just as rapidly as possible . . . I seldom hit a woman, but if you don't leave me alone, I'll start kicking babies." Either man could furnish a Gothic narrative on his own, but merging their plotlines is what really sends Louise off the rails, as the anguish of not being "lovable" enough to make David stay finds its explanation in the conviction that she must have done something monstrous to forfeit his affections, something unforgivable, like murdering a lonely man's wife in order to take her place and make the man of her dreams jealous enough to come back to her as he swore he never would . . .
And then the psychobabble rolls back in. Possessed works hard to build a sumptuous, seasick mood of unreliable perception and unstable memory, in which Louise can hear the voice of the first Mrs. Graham calling to her from the electronic blare of an intercom or the cold, black, lapping waters of the lake and the audience shouldn't be able to guess which version of Carol coming upstairs after an evening at the opera is the real one until they're both done speaking, but every time we cut back to the white-clad hospital staff saying things like "Typical schizoid detachment" and "Do you notice the beginning of the persecution complex?" the whole thing just folds up and falls over like a broken deck chair. It even has the five-minute psychiatric monologue to wrap up all loose ends at the finale. I can't explain it. You want a Gothic, then you let people have their brooding and their tortured gestures and their psychotropic weather. You don't slap labels on the melodrama. It makes the characters look silly; it makes the film look like it doesn't trust itself. Constantly yanking the audience out of Louise's perspective into the critical, clinical reductions of her (badly dated) diagnosis breaks not only our immersion in the story but our identification with Louise, especially when the effect of these analyses is to diminish her further from an individual heroine to a type specimen, a "beautiful woman—intelligent, frustrated . . . It's always the same. A problem of some kind—simple, perhaps, but she was unable to cope with it. And now this," where this is near-catatonia from which only drugs and men's insistent voices can rouse her to tell her tale. I can imagine a movie which played with this effect deliberately: the protagonist envisions her life at a Gothic pitch of romance and suspense, the reality is that she's just ordinarily, mundanely overreacting and reading too much into things. I don't think the script for Possessed is that clever. I don't believe it's trying to anticipate The Snake Pit (1948), either: the music which accompanies the wrap-up monologue is too heroic. When Stanley Ridges' Dr. Willard delivers the sententious verdict that "this civilization of ours is a worse disease than heart trouble or tuberculosis," we are almost certainly expected to agree. I'm not saying the filmmakers did wrong in making a modern Gothic, but I couldn't help noticing that the plot could have withstood a period treatment with almost no alterations—Dean might have needed to make his money in steel or railways instead of oil, but David's ambition to build a bridge with a particular parabola is timeless and Louise's successive jobs as nurse and governess to the Graham family are almost retrograde in the film's contemporary, postwar setting. Her fear of being institutionalized by her husband would have translated naturally to the age of Bedlam and we might then have been spared the weirdly Christian and frankly horrifying characterization of psychiatric treatment presented by Dr. Willard to a worried Dean: "It was pain that made her this way. Only through greater pain and suffering beyond belief can she get well again." I don't care who the filmmakers consulted with, my grandfather got his PhD in psychology in 1947 and he never once tried to persuade me that getting mentally healthier had to be literal hell or it wouldn't work. Remind me to avoid your therapists like the plague, Los Angeles County Hospital.2
Maybe my feelings toward this movie are more anger after all. Everyone's behavior in Possessed is psychologically plausible, but you wouldn't know from the way the supposed experts discuss it. It makes a great framework for a woman to suffer within, but I maintain the protagonist was doing just fine on that front without professional help. So as with many badly flawed works of art, I end up treasuring fragments of this movie more than the movie itself. The way Van Heflin looks like a hot librarian in the nerd-heavy horn-rims that David wears at his drafting table; the way he gets one genuine moment of shock and empathy in his last confrontation with Louise and otherwise leaves the picture as he entered it, an A-1 asshole who really has no idea what he's taking lightly. Raymond Massey slouching in from a fishing expedition in a windbreaker and a hat fishhooked with fly lures, clumsier and gentler in his craggy body than I have ever seen him; because he proposes to her not five minutes after David has rejected her yet again, she laughs almost in Dean's face and he reacts with some embarrassment but without anger, which is perhaps why she decides to marry him after all. Joan Crawford's nearly-no-makeup in the frame story—intended to demonstrate how despairingly she has let herself go in her mad search for her demon lover—showed me instead what an interesting face she had: lean-boned, strong-jawed, her most expressive features her sensitive dark brows and her silently searching eyes. As soon as we flash back to happier days when she wore powder and lipstick and eyeshadow like every well-balanced woman, she looks much more like herself in photographs, which means much more conventionally attractive.3 I like the point-of-view shot with which Louise enters the hospital, sliding beneath signs and ceilings and reflecting lights and the nostril-first faces of a pair of ER nurses, who speak over her quickly and professionally—I believe them, even if the ward they abbreviate as "Psycho" stands for "Psychopathic." "One manic, three seniles, six alcoholics, and ten schizos." I like quite a lot of the flashback sequences until the psychobabble interrupts. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film blow its own kneecaps off in quite this fashion before. This curate's egg brought to you by my recovering backers at Patreon.
1. I have positive memories of her Flämmchen in Grand Hotel (1932), but I haven't seen the film since high school. It was my introduction to its entire cast. As a result I always think of Lionel Barrymore as a sympathetic character rather than Mr. Potter, but once I found out that Buster Keaton had been seriously considered for the part of Otto Kringelein, I wanted that branch of the universe so much more.
2. On top of everything else, this film squarely hits my MENTAL HEALTH DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY button.
3. My favorite photograph of Crawford was taken by George Hurrell and is the unretouched version of a portrait for Laughing Sinners (1931); it is the only reason I know she had freckles, which were otherwise hidden with cosmetics and the painstaking predecessors of Photoshop. I couldn't see them even in her washed-out scenes in Possessed, so I assume she was wearing minimal makeup after all. I hope her freckles featured at least once in a movie. I think they're great.
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Ergh. I understand why you're asking, but I'm not confident it would work: the internal cutaways could probably be skipped (and the flashback scene in which Louise sees a psychiatrist on her own time and is diagnosed with neurasthenia and incipient schizophrenia), but the opening and closing portions of the frame contain real information and plot movement as well as psychobabble. A lot is left hanging otherwise. I don't know how to recommend watching this movie except perhaps humming determinedly every time a doctor is onscreen, but still paying attention in case anyone else in the scene speaks.
no subject
Have you seen Crawford's Autumn Leaves (1956)? It's also laced with Freud and full of dubious psychiatry, though it isn't Crawford who suffers a breakdown in this one. (Cliff Robertson does, in an amazing performance.)
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I didn't either until I saw the double-page spread of unretouched and final portrait in George Hurrell's Hollywood: Glamour Portraits 1925–1992 (2013), edited by Mark A. Vieira. I give the information in toto because the picture looks even better full-sized. The rest of the book is pretty great, too. I hadn't realized how many iconic pictures were his.
Have you seen Crawford's Autumn Leaves (1956)? It's also laced with Freud and full of dubious psychiatry, though it isn't Crawford who suffers a breakdown in this one. (Cliff Robertson does, in an amazing performance.)
Never, but you make it sound like it would be a change! I like Cliff Robertson.
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Are those the dubious psychiatry or something else?
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And yeah, that's not how mental health works!
no subject
I hadn't even thought of it from that direction, but you're right. There is real mystery in Possessed, and there is, if not evil, then at least some really bad behavior, and in a Gothic she might mistrust herself to the point of losing touch with the real world and emerge from it on her own terms—as in Gaslight—and in Possessed she can't. So it's doubly wrong for the tropes.
And yeah, that's not how mental health works!
There are way too many movies for which that's the genre.