Joan going out of her mind over no-good Van Heflin. "Possessed" was the 1947 melodrama that found Miss Crawford at her Oscar-nominated best and under Curtis Bernhardt's beautifully nuanced direction it's a picture that has much to recommend it. It begins with a near catatonic Joan wandering the streets of Los Angeles before being taken to hospital where she spills her back-story to Dr. Stanley Ridges.
That involves being a nurse to an invalid, a suicide, a loveless marriage and finally to a ... well, you can see what's coming from a long way off. A superb Raymond Massey is the man Joan marries on the rebound but this is The Joan Crawford Show from start to finish. Massively underrated by almost everyone other than Terence Davies who named this as one of his ten best pictures in the recent Sight and Sound poll. It's hardly that but it's certainly well worth seeing all the same.
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