I'm giving this one a 7/10 just based on the chemistry of Clark Gable and Joan Crawford alone! If it had been some other couple playing the leads this would only have warranted about a 5/10. It's another take on one of Joan's shop girl roles that MGM so often cast her in, except here she (Marian) works in a box factory. The rather boorish Al Manning (Wallace Ford) thinks Marian is his for the asking, but Marian has bigger ideas. She has a conversation with a very drunk and wealthy Wally (Skeets Gallagher) who is enjoying the night air on the caboose of a train in the train yard, and he gives her his card and tells her to come see him. Now Marian goes home to mom and an angry Al - he smells the liquor on her breath - and they have it out. She says she is leaving town and going to meet up with Wally in New York. She says that if she was a man they'd think it was right for her to use her brains to get what she can however she can. Now that last statement is an odd one because Marian behaves quite naively for the next 15 minutes of the film, not brainy at all. She DOES go to New York and she DOES look up Wally...who has little or no memory of her and is displeased to see her. But she catches him in one of his rare sober moments and he tells her upfront the invitation was never sincere, neither is he, and NO he will not introduce her to any of his rich friends. Marian is dejected and ejected. Her lucky break? Two of Wally's rich friends are on the way into his apartment as she leaves and she simply follows them back in. She just plainly asks them if they are rich and single because she has no time to waste on them if they are not! Now this is all very stupid obvious behavior from Marian, who could easily have become a sadder but wiser girl if any of these men had the drive or ambition to make her one, but she lucks out. Gable's character (Mark Whitney) takes an instant liking to her honesty - you'll find out later why exactly, and the two are an instant couple, but not a married couple, for the next three years, traveling the globe together. Whitney even gives her a fake name and identity - Mrs. Moreland, a divorcée - so they can explain her expensive lifestyle as emanating from alimony. Mark shows her how to speak, how to dress, how to command a household of servants, how to host a dinner party - a complete makeover from the country mouse she was. Then complications arise. Marian wants marriage that Mark won't give her, and New York's political machine wants Mark to become governor- and that means no mistress. How will this all work out? Watch and find out. Like I said, nothing unusual here for early 30's MGM - the shop girl and the wealthy guy and the entailing Cinderella transformation, the small minded small town boyfriend, the mom who waits back home with a light in the window, the respectability that a mistress never has, etc. But every time Gable and Crawford are together you can feel the electricity - which was real by the way. The two had an affair for years but never got married because they figured they'd fight as man and wife. And then there are a couple of coincidences. Here Joan takes on the identity of a divorcée and is taught the etiquette her station as Mark's companion will require. In 1950 she is also given a new name "Lorna Hanson Forbes" and the identity of a divorcée so she can be a married gangster's social companion and mistress with no questions asked. Then there is a film starring Joan with an identical name - "Possessed" - made in 1947. It has a completely different storyline though and is made by a different studio - Warner Brothers. I'd say watch it, try not to get put out by the forgettable plot with a rather unsatisfactory ending and just note the great chemistry between Gable and Crawford, and really good acting in the supporting roles especially by Skeets Gallagher and Wallace Ford. Recommended.

Nobody wrote better screen soap operas than Lenore Coffee, and she introduces some surprisingly modern notions of being-a-kept-woman in this pre-Code star vehicle for Joan Crawford, in her ambitious-gal-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks phase. To escape the numbing mediocrity of her small-town box factory and unappealing suitor (Wallace Ford), she decamps to the Big Apple and soon meets up-and-coming lawyer-politician Clark Gable. Gable was 30 and unpolished, and isn't quite convincing as a man about town still smarting from a disastrous first marriage; ten years later he'd have been ideal. The camera loves Crawford, and Coffee is refreshingly nonjudgmental about the affair the pair pursues, though a couple of odd quirks pop up in its telling. To steer gossips away, the pair pretends she's a widow, which seems not only unnecessary but pointless; how is this going to throw anyone off their scent? And though she's clearly a kept woman, when old boyfriend Ford visits her and learns The Truth, she assures him there's nothing dirty going on; either she's lying or this is a very peculiar mistress relationship. It's swift and breezy with terse dialog, and though the 11th-hour plot turnabout is as unconvincing as every commenter says it is, one is entertained up to the end.

I came by this movie when someone I know at work gave me a still-sealed copy from the Warner Archive Collection; they'd sent him two of the same title by mistake. Since it was Clark Gable and Joan Crawford I decided I'd give it a chance. Joan plays a factory worker who gets tired of the hum-drum life she leads and isn't interested in the man who's longed to marry her since they were kids (Wallace Ford) so she leaves it all and travels to New York City where she plays mistress to a wealthy lawyer (Gable) to get the kind of high living she wants. Three years later, Ford still wants to marry her, and Gable intends to run for Governor but his chances may be jeopardized by living with a woman. This pre-code film was nothing earth shattering, but had good performances from Crawford and Gable, and for me an added surprise bonus with a strong turn by Wallace Ford. I think through this movie it's easy to see Crawford's talents and how Gable was destined to become a big star. Director Clarence Brown has a nice touch, and some shots are very impressive. The one which stood out most for me is early on where Joan longingly observes well-to-do people interacting on a slow-moving train, as we see them through the windows of each passing car. When I see artistic flourishes like this in so many early '30s pictures (and many silents), my old defense of Tod Browning's Dracula for being dull due to it being an early talkie certainly falls flat. **1/2 out of ****

Joan Crawford is a girl who longs for a better and faster life than she has in Podunkville, USA with factory worker Wallace Ford eager for her hand in marriage. She journeys to NYC where she charms Clark Gable, a lawyer with political ambitions, into a relationship. Not marriage, mind you, though to keep the relationship secret she now goes by the name of a widow.I was reminded of that line from Goodfellas where the wise guys bring girl friends to the Copacabana on Thursday night and wives on Friday night. I guess Gable doesn't qualify to go on Friday nights. Today the whole premise of the film is ridiculous because these two are both unmarried adults. Class distinctions just ain't what they used to be.Women have certainly come a long way from 1931 where apparently the only career choices open to them were wife and mom or the kept Possessed woman. That's why the film is so dated. But Gable and Crawford make it interesting to watch, but it's in neither of their top 10 lists.In Possessed there is a really nice torch ballad entitled How Long Will It Last which Crawford sings. But a better version of it was done by Bing Crosby in one of his early Brunswick recordings.