(Hemmungslose Liebe [de])
USA 1947
d: Curtis Bernhardt
Warner Home Video (Region 0 us)
sc: Ranald MacDougall, Silvia Richards (based on the story "One Man's Secret" by Rita Weiman)
c: Joseph Valentine, Sidney Hickox (uncredited) (b/w)
e: Rudi Fehr
pd: Anton Grot
m: Franz Waxman; Robert Schumann (from "Carnaval, Opus 9")
p: Jerry Wald (Warner Bros.)
w: Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey, Geraldine Brooks, Stanley Ridges, John Ridgely, Moroni Olsen, Erskine Sanford, Peter Miles, Jakob Gimpel, Isabel Withers, Lisa Golm, Douglas Kennedy, Monte Blue, Don McGuire
pr: 26 Jul 1947
aw: Academy Awards 1948 Nominated Oscar Best Actress in a Leading Role Joan Crawford
rt: 108:02 min
dvd-rl: 14 Jun 2005
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: English Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English, Spanish, French; CC
supp: The Joan Crawford Collection
• Audio Commentary by Film Historian Drew Casper
• Featurette "Possessed: The Quintessential Film Noir" (9:34 min)
• Theatrical Trailer (2:06 min)
Crawford may play a nurse, but she'd need a warehouse of Phensics to clear up her troubles in this one. Madly in love with nogoodnik Heflin, she chooses to marry her wealthy employer (Massey) after his own ailing wife has tottered into insanity and suicide. Joan totters the same way soon after, and no one in the '40s could do it with such steely eyes or tautened shoulders. And she's helped every inch of the way by the Warners melodrama machine, working at fever pitch under the direction of German émigré Bernhardt, revelling in the expressionist tradition of morbid fantasy and psychological anguish. Compelling viewing, then, and a film even madder than most of its characters.
— GB, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
When psychoanalysis enjoyed its Forties vogue, Hollywood discovered an audience fascinated by a hitherto unexposed subject: dramatizations of mental disintegration. Possesssed is the case study of a classic split personality, a nurse whose increasingly schizophrenic behavior leads to a murderous conclusion. Louise Howell (Joan Crawford) is hired by a wealthy man (Raymond Massey) to care for his deranged wife. When the latter mysteriously drowns and Louise is suspected of murdering her charge, a distressing guilt complex surfaces. Though tortured by unrequited love for an indifferent architect (Van Heflin), Louise enters a loveless marriage with her widowed employer. The discovery that Heflin loves her wild stepdaughter triggers Louise's psychosis and she kills the object of her obsession. "As is true of many '40s American films, Possessed is uncompromising in its bleak point of view. Oriented towards affairs of the heart, this film is all the more troubling because the protagonist lacks the mental stamina to extricate herself from this sordid embroglio. Crawford masterfully portrays the despair of a lonely woman slipping into the netherworld of mental annihilation and delusion. Told via flashback, Curtis Bernhardt's film employs sets and a soundtrack which delineate the internal and external states of a shattered individual.
— L.A. Thielen, PFA
