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Chapter Eleven Possessed "Possessed (1947) contained the best performance I ever gave," Joan told Lawrence Quirk in 1956. "I put so much of myself into it!" She added that she always regretted not fighting the Warner Bros. front office harder when they came up with the title Possessed, as it was the same as her 1931 film for MGM. "I wanted to call it The Secret, but they overruled me. Since the main character was supposed, mentally, to be 'possessed' by devils, that seemed the more logical title to them." Louise Howell (Joan) is a nurse to a neurotic, bedridden woman who wrongly suspects that Louise is having an affair with her husband, Dean Graham (Raymond Massey). In fact, Louise is madly and unrequitedly in love with a neighbor, engineer playboy David Sutton (Van Heflin), who gracefully tries to rebuff Louise's advances, to no avail. After his wife commits suicide, Graham asks Louise to marry him, which she does after winning the blessing of his suspicious and hostile daughter Carol (Geraldine Brooks). Although Louise is not in love with Graham, all is set to proceed uneventfully, but then David boorishly crashes their wedding reception. Then David begins to court Carol, who falls in love with him. This all brings out the latent schizophrenia lying dormant in Louise, and she begins to have hallucinations. She goes to David's apartment and shoots him dead during a quarrel. This drives her into full psychosis, and she is picked up after collapsing in a coffee shop. Graham is called to her side at the hospital, determined to stick by her as she confronts an uncertain future. A controversial aspect of the picture is Louise's murder of David. At the end of the film a psychiatrist tells Graham that Louise will have to go on trial, and also that he believes she was not responsible for her actions. "Whether a jury will understand that or not, I can't tell you," the doctor says. When Louise pulls the gun on David, telling him to stay away from Carol, David - wisely or unwisely, depending on how you look at it - says, "At least be honest about it. You don't care about Carol. You never did. I'd rather be killed by a jealous woman than a noble one." Of course he's right, something a prosecuting district attorney would certainly play up in his closing statement to the jury. Even if Louise's mental illness is legitimate (as opposed to being merely emotionally disturbed), one suspects she would have shot David no matter what her mental condition. Her actions are those of a perfectly lucid jealous woman - one thinks of Jean Harris, the "diet doctor" murderess, for instance - and not an out-and-out psycho. Nowadays it would all make for an interesting episode of Law and Order. For the most part, Possessed was well directed by Curtis Bernhardt. The opening sequence, in which Louise wanders empty streets in shock looking for the man she has killed, is quite striking, as is the subjective camerawork during her arrival at the hospital. In later years, Joan was amused that the two doctors who first attend to Louise were both good-looking (we see them looking down at the camera, filling in for Louise's point of view). "Wouldn't you know they'd both be so handsome?" Joan joked. The actor playing the blond doctor had had a small part in the party scene of Humoresque, as one of the young men Helen Wright surrounded herself with. Possessed was scripted by Ranald MacDougall with Silvia Richards; he contributed the same wonderful dialogue that so enhanced Mildred Pierce. Critic James Agee probably summed it up best when he wrote of Joan's performance in Possessed, "Though she is not quite up to her hardest scenes, Miss Crawford is generally excellent, performing with the passion and intelligence of an actress who is not content with just one Oscar." Indeed, Joan did receive her second Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Possessed, but lost to Loretta Young for her work in The Farmer's Daughter. Joan certainly wasn't alone in thinking Possessed featured her best work on film. The Hollywood Reporter, for example, wrote that it was "the greatest performance - bar none - of her brilliant career." Her fans, however, have always been divided as to the accuracy of that statement. Is Joan really better in Possessed than she is in Mildred Pierce, A Woman's Face, or Rain? Probably not. In 1947, it was considered daring for an actor to tackle the role of a character with severe mental problems, and Possessed scores points because it even takes us directly inside Louise's mind on several occasions. There's a whole sequence, in which Louise hits Carol and sends her careening down the staircase, that turns out to be a complete hallucination, only taking place in Louise's distorted mind. (This sort of fantasy sequence is now obligatory in afternoon soap operas.) Joan researched schizophrenia and the behavior of patients afflicted with the disease, and she does convey her character's confusion and disorientation. Because she didn't play "mad" with grandiose gestures, clenched teeth, bulging eyes and distorted facial expressions, a la Dwight Frye as Renfield in Dracula, her interpretation was seen by some as great acting. In truth, her more restRained depiction of mental illness, using only the occasional off-kilter look, was a fairly standard delineation of psychosis for the period. For years afterward, Joan would congratulate herself on her portrayal of a schizophrenic, but the script merely calls for her to be either numb and unemotional (her hospital scenes) or biting and sarcastic (when she finally goes over the edge and shoots David). She doesn't really "go mad" with any particular finesse, but on the other hand she doesn't chew the scenery either, as a lesser actress might have. The doctors she interviewed and the patients she observed made it clear to her that that would have been the wrong way to go about the role. The next year, 20th Century Fox's The Snake Pit, starring Olivia de Havilland (who wasn't any better than Joan but had many more scenes in which she was required to play "crazy"), would take viewers into a mental institution and into the psychotic mind; this was only one of many other similar, but more intense and realistic, pictures. Joan's depiction has simply become dated. But as Agee and others observed, Joan is fine in the rest of the movie. It could be argued that she fails to create a sustained characterization, but she is, after all, playing a moody person (to put it mildly) with more than one personality, and the film itself is schizophrenic as well. Is Possessed a thriller, a drama, a "woman's film," a melodrama? It goes in many different directions. At one point it even threatens to turn into a ghost story, when Louise thinks she hears and sees her husband's dead former wife. For some viewers all of these elements never quite jell, but for others Possessed is absorbing, suspenseful, and - despite the fact that the story is told in flashback - unpredictable. We know all we really need to know about Louise in her first appearance in David's house, when she reveals how much she loves and needs him, and hints at her unstable nature. Her unrequited, obsessive love for David is a symptom of her illness, not the other way around. It has been remarked that Joan seems too cool, too much like a femme fatale, in the scene with the police after Graham's wife is found dead in the lake, but Joan was directed to act in that style, since Louise later erroneously comes to believe that she killed the woman. Director Curtis Bernhardt wanted the audience to keep guessing: did she do it or not? Joan's costars thought highly of her work in Possessed. Many years later, Raymond Massey told Lawrence Quirk, "I never realized until I did that picture with Joan what a naturally gifted actress she was. I had seen and admired a number of her earlier films, but I felt she had developed an expertise in purveying Hollywood artifice, and that her personality, rather than any real talent, carried her. Possessed changed my mind." Massey especially recalled the scene in which Graham asks Louise to marry him after David has just scornfully rejected her yet again. "I found myself electrified by the wild lightning in her ironic laughter, and the genuine passion and conviction with which she told my character how wonderful it was to be wanted, that she was through weeping, that 'terrible things happened to a woman when she wasn't wanted.' She had many other fine scenes in that picture, but that is the one that stays most vividly in my mind." In Possessed, Joan demonstrated more convincingly than ever how well her technique was working for her. She needed to feel the emotions of a scene so intensely that she would find herself living it, even an hour after the scene was over. "Actresses like Bette Davis may be able to turn it on and off at will," Joan said. "I can't do that, at least not with a role as complex and intense as the one in Possessed." Van Heflin, who was as blunt a critic of the performances of others as anyone, admitted somewhat sardonically in 1956 that Joan had also surprised him in Possessed: "Damn, I knew Joan had perfected the art of projecting her personality, but I never took her that seriously as an actress until I found myself up against her in that. She outplayed me, Raymond, everybody in the cast - and she was up against some experienced competition. Yet she carried the day." Heflin's own performance in Possessed is superb; he effortlessly creates a character who is simultaneously likable and unlikable, and his playing is consistently natural and believable. Don McGuire, the young actor who played the medical assistant in the psychiatric sequences, always remembered Joan's intensity, both in Possessed and in Humoresque, in which he had played a bartender. "Even when she was lying prone and comatose on a hospital bed, as she was in one sequence, there was an electricity to her. She was not lying there like a log, no sir. You could sense the suffering and torment just beneath the knocked-out, silent surface." In her first picture, Geraldine Brooks is excellent as well. She remarked how helpful Joan had been to her during the making of the film. "It was my first real part - I had to do a lot of reacting, and rather intensely. Joan went all-out, explaining the mechanics of the scenes. When Curtis [Bernhardt] asked her once, in jocular friendliness, who was directing, he or her, and why was she cuing-in me on the side, Joan shot right back and said she was the one who had to act with me, and she wanted our interplay just right. Curtis later agreed that she was right, that she got the tone and style she wanted when we worked together." The only other problem Joan had with Bernhardt was that he had just come off working with Bette Davis on A Stolen Life, and occasionally referred to Joan as "Bette." Joan would playfully throw something at Bernhardt, but she was more amused than angry. Even though Joan was now working at Davis's studio, they were working on different projects, and they weren't interacting that much. At this point in time, there wasn't much of a "feud" between them. The musical score by Franz Waxman makes heavy use of the somber and tormented "Chopin" section of Robert Schumann's Carnaval, a collection of sad, introspective piano pieces. It certainly complements Joan's performance well. The Carnaval theme grabs the viewer's attention during the opening credits and grows more sinister and insistent as the film progresses, aptly accenting the stages of Louise's mental disintegration. Waxman's original music is particularly effective in a horrific scene in which Louise suffers the delusion that she has thrown Carol down a flight of stairs, killing her. The musical nuances, combined with Joan's tormented facial expressions, make for a memorably disturbing effect. Possessed was a very successful picture and won Joan a lot of positive attention. The executives at Warner's were thrilled with the results, especially in terms of its box-office grosses. A woman who had undergone shock treatment at a Pasadena sanitarium while Joan and others involved in the production were allegedly watching, however, smelled money, and even before the film was finished shooting she filed a lawsuit claiming invasion of privacy. Named in the action were the sanitarium, Warner Brothers, and Joan Crawford. The woman insisted that she had never given anyone permission to watch her treatment, and wanted $200,000 in damages. She settled out of court for far less than the amount she had been seeking. Daisy Kenyon (1947) has always divided Crawford fans, but love it or hate it, it's one of the actress's most interesting pictures. Like many of Joan's films, it needs to be seen more than once to be fully appreciated. The picture is indeed talky, which makes it dull for some, but the talk is mostly intelligent and psychologically astute. With handsome production values courtesy of 20th Century Fox, superior direction by Otto Preminger, and some fine acting from Joan and others, Daisy Kenyon has quite a lot going for it. Joan played the unmarried title character, who has fallen in love with a supposedly unhappily married lawyer, Dan (Dana Andrews), but Daisy realizes that he will never leave his wife Lucille (Ruth Warrick) for her. She meets and marries an emotionally wounded widower and former soldier named Peter (Henry Fonda), and the two of them try to build a life together while forgetting their past loves. But Dan can't let go of Daisy that easily, and the situation explodes when Lucille learns of Dan's true feelings for Daisy and sues for divorce. Peter seems willing to step aside and let Dan and Daisy renew their relationship, but is unsurprised when Daisy sends Dan packing, realizing how much she loves her husband. "When it comes to combat maneuvers, you two are babies next to me," he tells her at the end. As Daisy, Joan offers another professional, effective and generally realistic performance as a very conflicted woman. It's interesting that Joan did Daisy Kenyon for Fox, when she criticized Warners for putting her into too many stereotypical "Joan Crawford" films. In the naturalistic scene in which Dan comes to her apartment and tries to kiss her after she has broken off with him, Joan utterly embodies the appropriate emotions as Daisy pushes him away, beats him with her fists, and finally bursts into tears. Throughout her life, Joan tried to resist the alluring pull of men she knew were wrong for her. In making this scene believable, she had plenty of experience to draw upon. She also had plenty of experience being in love with married men. In Daisy Kenyon, where the heroine is the mistress, the audience is asked to accept that the wife is undeserving of her husband, with precious little evidence but the implication that her own unhappiness has caused her to treat her children roughly. Daisy never wonders what Lucille may be going through: "I have more to be jealous of than she does, " she tells Dan. Despite Joan's fine and incisive performance, it often seems as if her personality is solely defined by her relationship with the two men in her life. She seems to have no real characterization except insofar as it relates to Dan and Peter. Still, Daisy doesn't completely let the men off the hook - for example, she's furious that the two men try to decide upon her fate together. There is reason to believe that the writer of Daisy Kenyon, David Hertz, working from the novel by Elizabeth Janeway, had more in mind than just a simple soap opera. When Peter tells Daisy that since his wife's fatal car accident he has been emotionally numb, she informs him that if he were really numb he "wouldn't know it and wouldn't be here trying to convince me of it." When Dan complains that he's been humbled by losing his first case, Daisy tells him, "That's not being humble, that's being sorry for yourself." Daisy is an attractive, intelligent, in some ways modern woman, but she is not an especially warm one. In the case Dan loses, he was trying to help an (unseen) Japanese-American soldier who had fought bravely for the U.S. during the war reacquire the farm taken from him while he was overseas (this would have made an interesting movie all by itself). It is not surprising that the essentially selfish Dan would feel sorrier for himself than for the unfortunate soldier, but the script required that Daisy show as little real emotion over the whole matter as Dan does. As Dan, Dana Andrews offers one of his best performances. It could be argued that Henry Fonda lacks the resources to convey his character's vulnerability, world-weariness, and pathos, but he quotes Robert Burns to Joan quite convincingly. Preminger keeps the otherwise talky movie lively with some interesting touches. As Dan leaves Daisy's apartment in the first scene, her smile turns to a frown, she sinks into a chair, and in the background a rainfall can suddenly be seen through the window. Theatrical, perhaps even cliched - but it works. When the constant ringing of the phone - she knows it's either Dan or Peter bothering her at a moment when she needs to be alone - drives Daisy out of the cottage and into her car, Preminger keeps the ringing phone on the soundtrack even as she's driving hastily down the road. Preminger, who also produced the picture, hedged his bets by inviting two famous newspaper columnists, Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons, to appear as themselves in a scene set at the Stork Club in Manhattan. This insured that Daisy Kenyon would get plenty of coverage in the press, but not all of the reviews turned out to be favorable. There was some second-unit location shooting done in Greenwich Village to match sets built on a Hollywood soundstage. This is one of the few instances in which Greenwich Village in a movie actually looks like the real Greenwich Village. (Some of the worst offenders in this regard are Greenwich Village (1944), The Seventh Victim (1943), and - worst of all - Stanley Kubrick's final film Eyes Wide Shut.) The building where Daisy's apartment is located, 32 West 12th Street, still exists, and it looks just like it does in the movie. The Greenwich Village theater where Daisy and her friend go to the movies, and where Dan watches for them from a coffee shop across the street, was torn down in 2001 to make room for a gymnastic studio. The coffee shop has since been modernized and has re-opened under a new name. Fonda and Andrews found the set of Daisy Kenyon too cold - literally. Joan wanted the air-conditioning turned up high during this particular shoot - she liked it around fifty-eight degrees - and they were constantly complaining about the temperature. At first they were pretending to shiver; after a while, they were shivering for real. Fonda wore a raccoon coat - and not just for show. Joan bought them pairs of long underwear and jokingly suggested they wear them underneath their clothing. Joan was attracted to both of the leading men, but she didn't get very far with Fonda at first. She went to the wardrobe department and asked them to make her what Dore Schary described as "a jockstrap of rhinestones, gold sequins, and red beads." She had the jockstrap gift-wrapped and presented it to Fonda, although it took him a while to figure out what the hell it was. Later, as they were shooting a scene requiring Fonda to carry Joan up some stairs, she whispered gently in his ear, inquiring whether he would model it for her later. "He almost dropped me down the stairs," Joan laughed. In his private life, Fonda was actually in a situation similar to that of his character's rival Dan, unhappily married to a woman who strenuously objected to his affairs and who would eventually commit suicide. Otto Preminger always spoke respectfully of Joan. "I had a happy time making Daisy Kenyon with that remarkable, independent, and competent woman," he wrote in his memoirs. To Lawrence Quirk he said, "Joan was a pro who knew how to get the effect she was after. She did not need much help from me. By that time in her career, she'd appeared in dozens of movies and knew what she was doing, which was more than I could say about a lot of other actors I've worked with. I found her very pleasant, amusing, and generous." During filming, Joan bought new outdoor furnishings for Preminger's garden because she noticed that his existing ones were a little worn. Others would jump at this as proof of Joan's "controlling nature" or presumptuous behavior, but surely it was just a pleasant gesture for someone she liked. Joan often did impulsive things like that, usually with the best of intentions. She always credited Preminger with pulling off Daisy Kenyon, which she felt had a cliche-ridden storyline - "the usual triangle helped out by two very handsome young men." Ruth Warrick, however, was never a fan of Crawford's. "She seemed to live in a crackle of tension one could almost feel like a physical thing around her," she wrote in her memoirs. Warrick was also annoyed with Joan because of the air-conditioning. Joan lost further points with Warrick when she saw Joan instructing her children how to behave in front of the press. Like many people, Warrick didn't understand that this was just common sense to someone as public-oriented as Joan. There was inevitable jealousy on both sides as well. Warrick was eleven years younger than Joan, but Joan was a major star, whereas Warrick's only noteworthy film credit was Citizen Kane, before she was banished to the relative obscurity of television soap operas. Warrick was only one of many lesser performers who sharpened their axes on Joan because of her success. Considering her opinion of Crawford, it is ironic that Warrick plays a child abuser in Daisy Kenyon. "You see [the children] for five minutes a day," Lucille tells Dan, "but interfere when I try to make better human beings out of my daughters!" As far as Joan was concerned, her disciplining of her children was intended for the same reason. The year Daisy Kenyon was released, 1947, was also the year Joan adopted two more children, little girls named Cindy and Cathy whom she always referred to as "the twins." Flamingo Road was based on a novel by Robert Wilder (it was also a play); he would later write Written on the Wind, among other movies. He was hired to compress his sprawling story into an hour and a half of screen time. The story deals with a woman. Lane Bellamy (Joan), who stays behind in the small town of Boldon when the rest of the carnival employing her as a dancer has to flee from creditors. She's grown tired of hopping from place to place and wants to lay down roots in Boldon, hoping one day to make it to the ritzy part of town, Flamingo Road. The deputy sheriff, Fielding Carlisle (Zachary Scott), befriends and romances Lane, but marries his society fiancée when he decides to run for the Senate. Sheriff Titus Semple (Sydney Greenstreet) tries to throw Lane out of town so that she can't tempt Fielding; when that fails, he has her thrown in jail on bogus charges of prostitution. Lane not only gets out of jail, but winds up married to political boss Dan Reynolds (David Brian), and they live together - where else? - on Flamingo Road. But Titus still wants to make trouble for the couple and, in a bravura climax, Lane winds up shooting the rotund troublemaker as they tussle over a gun. Dan vows to wait for her to get out of jail. End of movie. Michael Curtiz hoped to give the melodramatic Flamingo Road the same bite he had given Mildred Pierce, but this time around he was working with an inferior story. Although Curtiz suggests the interlocking of Lane's and Field's fates by surrounding their silhouettes with a circle of light, the film loses the thread of this theme rather quickly. Worse, a half hour in, Joan seems no longer to be the focus of the movie - it's simply taken over by the convoluted chicanery of the portly, milk-guzzling sheriff Titus Semple. At least Greenstreet made for a formidable opponent for Joan, who remembered that "Sydney was a really fine actor, and it was a pleasure to have someone on that level to play off in our scenes together. He certainly gave me a run for my money. What a presence! And that girth of his!" Underneath a more or less amiable nature, Greenstreet had an essential contempt for "movie stars and pretty people," but he respected Joan, whom he saw as "tough, professional, and a better actress than a lot of people realize. Her gifts may not have been natural, her talents may have been carefully nurtured or even manufactured over the years, but however she learned, she learned." In Flamingo Road, Greenstreet is given a speech about how fat people are always perceived as happy and harmless but underneath may be quite a different story, a perception Titus exploits to the hilt in the movie (although he seems malevolent from the very first). Lane's first comment on Greenstreet's Sheriff Semple: "We had better looking people than that in our sideshows." Author Robert Wilder and his wife had first turned the novel into a play, from which some of the amusing dialogue was lifted. After Lane tells Fielding that she only has three dollars to her name, he replies, "that isn't much," to which she says, "That's a lot when I think of how many times I didn't have three dollars." Locked up in jail, she asks another inmate what she's in for. The reply: "My boyfriend cut himself on a knife I was holding." Flamingo Road keeps returning to the Crawford-Greenstreet duel of wits, which is where the movie really hums. Titus likens Lane to a rat that kept nibbling on his toes until he went about "plugging up all the rat holes." When he tells Lane that she's still acting like a cheap carnival girl, she slaps him in the face - twice. (This leads to her being framed for prostitution.) Lane gets even when she turns up as the now-wealthy Mrs. Dan Reynolds and tells Titus about a rogue elephant who went after his keeper and was shot. "You wouldn't believe how much trouble it is to dispose of a dead elephant." Lane Bellamy is a typical hard-outside/soft-inside kind of character that Joan was essaying during this period. Joan looks very pretty with her hair lightened for the role and, as Lane, is insolent, smart-mouthed, and borderline bitchy. As usual in pictures of this sort, Joan identified with women born on the wrong side of the tracks who wanted to carve out a better life for themselves and felt bitter over their status and the condescension of others. "I'm sick of having people look at me like I was cheap," says Lane. Joan had high hopes for Flamingo Road, and during filming she thought it would turn out to be a genuinely great movie. She enjoyed reporting to the set, despite a nagging cold that affected her throughout much of the filming. She thought the whole thing was a perfect illustration of her occasional lapses in judgment. "That one just didn't work, but for heaven's sake don't ask me why," she told Lawrence Quirk, who liked it much more than she did. "There was Curtiz working on it, and Wilder scripting his book. It seemed like it was a charmed project. Honestly, I don't think it's one of my better ones. I just thought it would turn out so much better than it did. I think a lot of good stuff that might have saved it was left on the cutting room floor. There's a lot of difference between the movie that emerges and the movie that might have been." In truth, had the picture remained more focused on Lane and Fielding, or been a half an hour longer, it might have amounted to more than it did. Twice during the movie, Joan sings fragments of the saucy number "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight." While her voice still isn't great, by this time she had developed into a rather good vocalist, with an assured and insinuatingly sexy style. Zachary Scott, who had also been in Mildred Pierce, emerges as a rather odd-looking leading man without his trademark mustache, but his performance, especially during a drunk scene in which he eventually commits suicide, is first-rate. This was the first time Joan worked with David Brian, whom she liked. A solid but not great actor, Brian had a masculine confidence about him that Joan responded to, and she would work with him again on two other films. Joan had no problem sharing Brian with Eve Arden, who told Joan she had a big crush on him. Joan told Arden it would be easy for her to arrange a date. Joan, unfortunately, never told Arden that Brian was married, probably because it didn't matter to her and figured it wouldn't matter to Arden. Arden had a drink with Brian but resisted an affair. In 1980, the movie was remade as a TV movie starring former model Cristina Raines, who played the part as a kind of disaffected hippie with excellent cheekbones. The ratings were strong enough for Flamingo Road to debut as a regular series in the early I980's, but the soap opera only lasted for two seasons. Joan next appeared with many other famous guest stars in It's a Great Feeling (1949). Much like the Norma Shearer short of the previous decade, The Slippery Pearls (also known as The Stolen Jools), It's a Great Feeling featured oodles of stars doing cameos in a plot tied to the film business. The picture is a spoof of Hollywood with Jack Carson (playing himself) trying to direct a picture starring himself and Dennis Morgan (also playing himself) because no one else will helm it. In only her third movie, Doris Day plays a waitress who is discovered by Morgan and Carson and stars in their film. Encountering famous faces as they prepare to shoot the picture, the two men run into the real Joan Crawford in a dress shop. Joan was praised for her hilarious spoof of the kind of sophisticated, beautifully attired women she so often played. Although she had some concerns about where her career was heading, Joan was fairly happy and more than confident that she had become a legitimate Hollywood survivor. The next thing she knew, she had become a victim.
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