Possessed (1947)

Ooo Joan is crazy in this one. Possessed, if you will. Some descriptions of this film describe it as a rare unglamorous performance for Crawford. Umm... no. She is unglamorous in exactly one scene. The rest of the time she looks her usual, perfectly put together self.

Crawford was nominated for an Oscar for this film (her second nomination), but I don't know. These Crawford movies sort of feel all the same to me. Glamorous woman, jealousy, men who can't help but love her or don't know how to quit her or desperately want to hurt her. They just all sort of have this pot-boiler quality to them, and she seems to me rather the same in them all. (I mean, I guess that's what it is to be a movie star, but it does feel rather repetitive.)

To be fair to Possessed, this particular movie has a frame of mental illness and schizophrenia. Crawford is picked up in a catatonic state in Los Angeles, barely able to speak. She's lost her mind. Then from there we go into flashback to find out what happened. The frame is trying to tell a story of a kind of love madness and deal with psychiatry as a profession that might do some good – in this way it's in conversation with films like Private Worlds (1935), Lady in the Dark (1944), and Spellbound (1945). This frame is rather interesting; it's the flashbacks that are all typical Crawford melodrama. Nothing new to see there.