People are voting emotionally.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

..sang Cypress Hill in the 1990s. That song is clearly the inspiration for this 1947 film starring Joan Crawford (Louise) as a lunatic. She is obsessed with Van Heflin (David) and this obsession transfers itself into the 'possessed' referred to in the film's title. She seems fine. She's not. At first, you may think she's just exhibiting typical woman jealousy, etc. Nope. She goes a step further. Heflin doesn't want to know about her and that is his BIG mistake.The dialogue is realistic, confrontational and amusing and the cast are all good in this film that is, unfortunately, very slow to start. Keep with it and it develops through flashback segments as Crawford lies in a hospital bed. At one point, the film veers into the spooky horror genre and I yelled out at one point when an intercom kept buzzing. There are some clever techniques used and the story does have a few twists in the way it is recounted. I enjoyed it. Schizophrenia is depicted in a much cleverer and clearer manner in this film when compared to Humphrey Bogart having a stab at it in "The Two Mrs Carrolls" from the same year. Crawford is more adept than Bogey.The other Joan Crawford films worth checking out from the 1940s are "Strange Cargo" (1940), "A Woman's Face" (1941) and "Mildred Pierce" (1945).

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, and co-written by Ranald MacDougall, this (cutting edge for its time) psychological drama features Crawford's second of three Best Actress Oscar nominated performances, and second of three pairings with writer MacDougall (she'd won for Mildred Pierce two years earlier). Crawford plays a disturbed woman who shows up in an unfamiliar city muttering names and words with no discernible meaning until a psychiatrist is able to uncover their origins using patience and drug treatment. The story he uncovers, during flashback storytelling, is this:Crawford was a nurse for a wealthy family that was also secretly in love with a confirmed bachelor, "in love with his work, and himself" engineer named David, played by Van Heflin (it's a mystery to me what women ever saw in this actor), who lives across the lake from the family's vacation home. Mrs. Graham is the invalid, confined to a wheelchair, to which Crawford's character Louise attends. David tires of Louise's overbearing possessive love and breaks off their affair. A distraught Louise returns to the Grahams and is chastised by Mr. Graham, Dean (Raymond Massey), for being absent, but she explains that it was her day off before she goes to attend to Mrs. Graham. An accident or a murder, it's intentionally a mystery, occurs causing Mrs. Graham to drown in the lake. The Grahams twenty- one year old daughter Carol (Geraldine Brooks) & preteen son return while an inquiry, by the coroner and Lieutenant Harker (John Ridgely), determines it was an accidental death.Dean hires David, then later falls for Louise, though she still loves David. Not knowing this, Dean still accepts Louise's respect for him as enough, hoping that will eventually grow into love. Dean marries Louise causing resentment from Carol who, not only blames Louise for her mother's death, but thinks she's a gold digger. However, Louise is able to smooth it over and the two become friends until Carol starts dating David, despite Louise's cautions. With the stress of it all, Louise's psychological condition deteriorates and she starts imagining things. As a former nurse, she has some realization of what is happening and goes to see a doctor, who confirms her diagnosis.Without giving away what happens next, or the ending, suffice it to say that Crawford gives a terrifically credible performance of a mentally unbalanced woman who goes over the edge.The various doctors are played by Stanley Ridges, Moroni Olsen, and Erskine Sanford.

There is some very good stuff in this film but it's way too long and repetitious. It overreaches, trying to be all things to all people -- a love story, a mental-illness screed, and a noir thriller. Joan Crawford is an interesting star. She isn't beautiful or even pretty and sometimes that works in a film because she is indeed a good actress. However, in this she gets too much screen time and bogs the movie down. However, Crawford's Louise is excellent in her scenes with David Sutton (Van Hefflin). Is there any woman who hasn't swooned over a guy who doesn't give a fig? ("'I love you' is such an inadequate way to say 'I love you!'") She nails this type of heart-rending predicament. The film is also good at sketching the perils of wishing away mental illness. Not only is Louise obsessive and self-loathing but she suffers from ideas of reference and often teeters toward psychosis, yet the film would have us believe that all she needs to heal is the love of a good man. Until "Possessed" turns into a shoot-em-up, that is. Hefflin is usually a rather understated presence in a film, but he's great in this. He's believable as a cad who hangs with Louise because he doesn't have anything better to do -- spot-on as the type of heel who will just get up and leave when the spirit moves him. "In love there are no relapses," he opines to a horrified Louise. "Once you're out of it, the feeling never comes back again." (Oh, I see. So THAT'S how it works.) And Hefflin's no less convincing as a lady-killer canoodling with a love-struck ingénue (played well by the winsome Geraldine Brooks). A bravura performance! However, Raymond Massey, so compelling in some other films, is wasted here as the polite-to-a-fault widower Dean Graham, who sees himself as old -- "It isn't very easy for a man my age to kiss a woman with dignity." Yet Massey was only 51 when this was made! (I can hear his joints creaking now.) The film drags through some extended sequences with psychiatrists and Louise feeling spooked by Graham's dead wife. And I found the ending too neat. (Why do we have to tie the story up with a neat little bow?) In the introduction to "Possessed" on TCM, Josh Mankiewicz notes that its director had an affair with Crawford during filming. Maybe that explains some of the bloating here. Which is a shame because there's a lot that's pretty good!

Joan Crawford gives a great and almost hypnotic performance as Louise, 'a woman in trouble'. One of the first films to explore the dark but realistic psychological territory of humanity in a certain way. A film where the inner demons of an individual may be the protagonists of the piece. A concept that subsequently brought such classics as Hitchcock's "Vertigo" ('58), "Psycho" ('60) and "Marnie" ('63), Bunuel's "Belle de jour" ('67) and Bergman's "Persona" ('66). Later these themes and concepts found it's way into the work of filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Brian De Palma, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Cronenberg and David Lynch. Especially the work of Polanski and Lynch seems to be influenced by Curtis Bernhardt's "Possessed". Films like "Repulsion" ('65), "Mulholland Drive" ('01) and "Inland Empire" ('06) are idiosyncratic variations on the same concept and theme.The film starts out with a woman in a trance-like state, roaming the streets... calling the name 'David'. When she's hospitalized it turns out she's a schizophrenic, struggling with the fate of drowning in insanity. The film explores all kinds of cinematic 'realitybending' and often plays with the line between reality and fantasy. Not to the extend as such filmmakers as Jean Cocteau or Luis Bunuel did prior to this film, but in a more subtle and refined way. Maybe somewhat more Hollywood, but nevertheless very profound and original at the time. This film even reminded me of my own film "Voorbijgangers" ("Travelers"), since this also is a film that explores the darker side of mankind. People struggling with what's real or illusion; struggling with their inner demons...I deeply recommend this film to anyone who enjoys some of the films I mentioned in the above.