I'm impressed with Joans' performance in this movie as she comes across as a very convincing troubled woman... over a man. The sad thing for the character she plays is she is never in control of her emotions when she's around the man that she is possessed about. When he's not there you'd never know that she has a problem. Did you ever love someone or have them believe that they were in love with you but it wasn't reciprocated? Wouldn't you avoid them as much as possible? Joan was 40 in this and I have to say she looked good, mind you I'm older than that now so... I felt for her, she tried to force something that wasn't there. Her psychosis, whether initialised from birth or created through her reasoning at the time, made it impossible for her to understand and accept to be true.

"Possessed" was included among TCM's "Summer of Darkness" series celebrating film noir, but it really doesn't belong to that genre. It's instead one of those rather tiresome "women's pictures" from the 1940s and 50s, melodramas that usually had some talented actress swooning over some leading man or other. In this one, it's Joan Crawford so obsessed with lover Van Heflin that she literally goes crazy when he breaks off their affair and she instead marries dutiful but dull Raymond Massey. Crawford is much more fun when she's taking charge, not weeping and wailing, and though she tries her best, she can't make much of this thankless character or director Curtis Bernhardt's utter lack of recognizable style.Still, she managed to somehow snag an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance.Grade: C

Possessed is directed by Curtis Bernhardt and adapted to screenplay by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall from a story by Rita Weiman. It stars Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raynond Massey and Geraldine Brooks. Music is by Franz Waxman and cinematography by Joseph Valentine.After wandering around the streets of Los Angeles in a daze, Louise Howell (Crawford) collapses in a diner and admitted to hospital. From there, prompted under medication, she begins to reveal a rather sad story...Film begins with quite a kick, a dazed looking Crawford, stripped of make-up, wanders around a ghostly looking Los Angeles uttering the name David. Once she enters the hospital, we switch to flashback mode and the makers unfurl a noir tale of mental illness, oneirism, hopeless love and death. German director Bernhardt (Conflict/High Wall) and his cinematographer Valentine (Shadow of a Doubt/Sleep, My Love) deal in expressionistic methods to enhance the story. Light and shadows often marry up to Louise's fractured state of mind, motif association flits in and out of the plotting and there's some striking imagery used; such as a body dragged from a lake and Louise framed in a rain speckled window.The lines of reality are impressively blurred, ensuring the viewers remain in a state of not ever being sure of what is real. There's a deft disorientation about the production, where fatalism looms large and sadness is all too evident in our troubled femme protagonist. Principal cast performances are of a high standard, with Crawford (Academy Award Nominated) leading the way with one of those wide eyed turns that perfectly treads the thin line between fraught and tender. While laid over the top is a score from Waxman that emphasises the key segments of poor Louise's mental disintegration. But what of the story in itself? The rhyme or reason for such murky melodramatics dressed up neatly in noir clobber?Story is pretty much wrapped around the notion that a romantic obsession sends Louise Howell on the downward spiral. Since we know next to nothing about the relationship between Louise and David Sutton (Heflin), or why Sutton is the sly and antagonistic way he is, it's a big hole in character formation. As is the death of Dean Graham's (Massey) wife, or in fact the sudden shift of Dean Graham becoming husband to one Louise Howell. The film looks terrific on a noir level, and Crawford engrosses greatly from start to finish, but it only seems to exist for these two reasons, all else is on the outer edges of the frame looking in. A shame because there is much to like and be involved with here. 7.5/10

A woman wonders through the streets of Los Angeles seeking out a man named David. She goes to a diner and the clients call an ambulance that takes her to a hospital. She is sent to the psychiatric wing with catatonic stupor and Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges) diagnosis that she has nervous disorder and injects some medicine to calm her down.She tells that she is a nurse named Louise Howell (Joan Crawford) that takes care of a paranoid woman named Pauline Graham in the family house in an island. Louise falls in an unrequited love with their neighbor, the construction engineer David Sutton (Van Heflin). When David ends their love affair, Louise becomes obsessed for him and David finds a job position in Canada with Louise's master Dean Graham (Raymond Massey).Sooner Pauline dies in an accident and the Graham family moves to Washington. Louise is hired as a tutor of Dean's young son Wynn, and his teenage daughter Carol Graham (Geraldine Brooks) blames Louise for the death of her mother. Later Dean proposes to marry Louise and Carol accepts her as stepmother. When David returns from Canada, Carol is a beautiful wealthy young woman and the opportunist David decides to marry Carol for money. Meanwhile, Louise has a deterioration of her mental state and is schizophrenic; when she learns that David will marry Carol, she takes and ultimate decision."Possessed" is an engaging and melodramatic film-noir where the lead character gets insane and obsessed for an unrequited love for a construction engineer. Joan Crawford has an awesome performance and in the beginning of the story she is totally deglamourized dressed like an ordinary woman. There are two minor flaws in the plot since her relationship with David is never seen while there are too much explanation about her madness process and I am not sure whether they follow a scientifically supported or not. My vote is eight. Title (Brazil): "Fogueira de Paixão" ("Bonfire of Passion")