(Contains spoilers. In fact, one might more accurately say, IS spoilers.)

POSSESSED, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, starring Joan Crawford, takes a long sultry look at the hot topic of what the movie medicos call "skizzo-phrenia", an affliction prevalent among frustrated career women.

There's a perhaps-unintended encapsulation of the experience of the mentally unorthodox right at the start as Joan C wanders, with a broken walk, the streets of LA, which are dotted with such things as BRACK SHOPS and another establishment decorated with a sign which reads METAL TAPES REPAIRED. We nodded at this skilled evocation of the world glimpsed through the eyes of the psychically confused.

Wandering into a diner (another sign: C

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                                              BURGER    E), Joan is unable to order, her vocabulary being limited to the word "David". As that doesn't correspond to anything on the menu, an ambulance is called.

The prostrate diva is rushed, sirens blaring (an emergency mental breakdown?) into what I presume must be the Leon Theremin Memorial Hospital for Melodramatic Diseases(POV looking up at ceiling as she trundles in on a gurney).

She seems unresponsive to the question "How many fingers?" Even Joan senses that "David" is not the right answer here. Snap judgment from doc with pencil moustache: "Look like a coma to me." So they wheel her to the PSYCHOPATHIC WARD.

Now kindly doctor Erskine Sanford (the huffing puffing editor from CITIZEN KANE) appears, combining the kindliness of Santa Claus with Freud's magical ability to pull a spurious diagnosis from his ass at the drop of a pipette. "Almost complete nudism," he pronounces, and we boggle briefly before realising that the word he used was actually "mutism". He's so Freudian he causes slips in others.

Pumping the recumbent drama queen full of "synthi-narcosis", the good doctor soon has her narrating flashbacks, (a positive sign!) and we learn that Joan, a nurse, was fond of "swimming" with a studly young mathematician. This Don Juan of the slide rule is played, preposterously, by Van Heflin, who obviously saw the character as wide-headed. I can picture the personals ad: "Clinging nurse in early stages of psychosis seeks gangling, frog-eyed mathematician for breast stroke and music recitals."

Van plays Schumann on the piano, or rather he sits in front of it and moves his shoulders as if walking jauntily, while Joan gets dressed after her "swim". Joan loves Van but he plays it cool, bragging about the new parabola he's invented (can this be right?), stressing his free-and-easy approach to life and love, and throwing in the phrase "mathematically speaking" every now and then by way of characterisation.

This touching tryst is transacted in the lake house of wealthy industrialist Raymond Massey, who spends much of the film packing Van off to Canada, which shows what a sympathetic man he is. Joan is looking after Mrs Raymond Massey, who is bedridden, offscreen, and suffering from pathological jealousy. Soon she's being fished from the lake, "much too late", leaving widower Raymond free to woo Joan after he's launched Van at the Canucks.

There's some strife with Ray's comely daughter, the film's token female non-lunatic, who resents Joan, having had her ears poisoned by her nutty mom, but this is resolved. But. Joan starts to crack up, hearing scary electronic voices from the buzzer that used to summon her to Mrs Massey's bedside and forming erroneous memories of murder.

Van Heflin doesn't help (when has Van Heflin ever helped?), continually popping back down over the border to irritate us, woo Raymond's teenage daughter, and continue to deny that he loves Joan. Joan is unable to accept this - "No consideration of his point of view," diagnoses the doctor, sternly, as we dip out of flashback for a moment. And here the films scores points, as we are genuinely unable to make up our minds about Van. True, he's smug, oleaginous and intrusive, and fond of talking mathematically, but he's pretty straightforward about what he's after, and is the only character with a sense of humour.

Joan's gradual loss of marbles is also evoked with some skill, and the scene where she pushes Massey's daughter downstairs, followed by her realisation that she HASN'T pushed anyone downstairs, is an arresting turn of events. Movies back then did not usually lie to their audience in this way, presenting hallucination as fact before revealing the truth. It's super.

Things come to a head as Joan bananas around the room, drawing the helpless camera after her in a psychotic ellipse, and then pulls a gun on Van. Perhaps unwisely, he sneers. He questions the sincerity of her desire to terminate him (a risky gambit considering that she's Joan Crawford, for God's sake, and he's Van Heflin, for God's sake) and opines that she has a minimal chance of hitting him (at point blank range?), "mathematically speaking." Joan's POV as he ambles into wide-headed close-up and grabs for the gun. Bang. He's a horrible mathematician, he's dead, and I bet his parabolas were all crooked.

A hopeful ending: concerned Raymond traces Joan to the Psychopathic Ward, where the doc reassures him that the patient will recover, though it will take months of terrible agony (this is, after all, Joan Crawford we're speaking of). She will have to be tried for murder, but it is to be hoped that a jury may realise that she was in no way responsible for her actions (and besides, it was only Van Heflin). Raymond nips in to see his nutty wife and we drift off down the antiseptic Corridors of Reason. The End. A Warner Bros Picture.

Reparto principal:
Orson Welles ... Charles Foster Kane
Joseph Cotten ... Jedediah Leland
Everett Sloane ... Mr. Bernstein
George Coulouris ... Walter Parks Thatcher
Dorothy Comingore ... Susan Alexander Kane
Ray Collins ... James W. Gettys
Agnes Moorehead ... Mary Kane
Paul Stewart ... Raymond
Ruth Warrick ... Emily Monroe Norton Kane
Erskine Sanford ... Herbert Carter
William Alland ... Jerry Thompson

Fotografía:
Gregg Toland

Música original:
Bernard Herrmann

Montaje:
Robert Wise

También conocida como:
El ciudadano

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