Possessed - For Suds
Suds:
Joan made two movies with the title Possessed, but neither has anything whatever to do with the other - they're completely different stories.
The first movie, made in '31 and directed by Clarence Brown, co-stars Clark Gable, and is the story of a factory worker (Joan) who runs off to the big city and becomes the mistress of an up-and-coming politician (Gable). His political enemies find out about the mistress, and try to use the relationship for a smear campaign against him. Joan tries to give Gable up for the good of his career, but Gable decides that he loves her more than being Governor of New York, clinch, kiss and fade out.
The second movie, made in '47 and directed by Curtis Bernhardt, is about a disturbed woman (Crawford) who is obsessed with an arrogant genius (Van Heflin). She wants him, he doesn't want her for anything more than a fling, and when he says so, she loses it and shoots him. Crawford's boss (Raymond Massey), who loves her and eventually marries her, realises she's Not All There and arranges treatment that helps get Joan in touch with her demons.
Both movies are really good work on Joan's part. The Gable movie is probably the best of her "Depression Princess" movies, where she lived out the fantasies of women of that era, who usually had very few choices in their lives due to hard times. Audiences were thrilled by Joan telling off her small-town boyfriend, running off to New York and becoming a woman kept in the lap of luxury. The second movie is a good example of Joan's "respected actress" period at Warner Bros., when intelligent, higher-brow audiences who would not have been Crawford fans ten years earlier began to enjoy her work very much, due to the superior scripts and fine acting seen in her movies of the time. 1946's Humoresque is, in my opinion, the best of her films from this period, and the best of her career, as well.
After the second Possessed, Joan's career took another nosedive, because Warner Bros. wanted to cash in on her new popularity and make cheaper movies with her. This led to campy movies like Flamingo Road, and downright terrible ones like This Woman is Dangerous.
By 1950, Crawford struck out on her own again, this time free-lancing with studios like Columbia and RKO; she made some very well-received movies like Harriet Craig and Sudden Fear, which was a smash hit and earned Joan her third Best Actress nomination. After that, she returned to M-G-M for Torch Song, a musical that certainly has camp value, but didn't put Joan back in the driver's seat at M-G-M the way she'd hoped it would. Later, she did more work for Columbia with Autumn Leaves and Queen Bee, and ended her years of unquestioned stardom with 1957's The Story of Esther Costello, which was made in England to lower costs.
After that, she was either co-starred, as she was with Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, or had a "special guest star" role, as she did in The Best of Everything, or she did TV roles or cheap movies just because she didn't want to do anything but make movies, no matter how bad they were. 1970's Trog was a sad, undignified end to a career that had had more than its share of classic movies. By 1972, she did her last work, a TV episode of The Sixth Sense, and was dead within five years, of pancreatic cancer. She refused to have it treated, ostensibly on religious grounds (Joan was a Christian Scientist), but there was also the cold hard fact that the end of her career left her very little to live for. She'd been a star for forty-two years, and now there was nothing.
By the way, she knew quite well by the time of her death that Christina was planning a book, and she had a general idea that it was not going to be flattering, though she seems not to have known how far Christina was going to go.
I caught Torch Song on PBS as a teenager, it was a catalyst for my love of 40's and 50's music. ("Tenderly", ahhh, now THAT'S entertainment) All these years later, I still love those movies; and Joan in particular. My mama is one of those "broad-shouldered dames" and a force to be reckoned with at nearly 90!! BTW, how's it going on "just plain Main"? Isn't Ben's neighborhood gorgeous? Makes you want to pull out the convertible and the furs, "don't it, Lora Mae" LOL
