Flickers in Time

Possessed
Directed by Curtis Bernhardt
Written by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall; story by Rita Weiman
1947/USA
Warner Bros.
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Louise: “I love you” is such an inadequate way of saying I love you. It doesn’t quite describe how much it hurts sometimes.[/box]

Whatever you might think of Joan Crawford’s acting style, she sure does make a convincing crazy person.

As the film opens, we see the dazed and disheveled Louise Howell (Crawford) wandering the streets of Los Angeles and calling out for “David” to random strangers.  She soon suffers a complete breakdown into catatonia in a diner and is taken to the hospital.  We are then treated to some psychiatric mumbo jumbo as the doctors try to determine what is wrong with her and who she is. They give her a drug which allows her to talk.

Segue to flashback.  Louise has been having an affair with bachelor engineer David Sutton (Van Heflin).  This is evidently the first big love of Louise’s life and David is unsuccessfully trying to bring the relationship gently to a close over her clinging, pleading, and threats.  Louise is the private nurse to the pathologically jealous and chronically invalid wife of wealthy construction magnate Dean Graham (Raymond Massey).  David approaches Graham and asks him for a job in northern Canada, evidently with the intention of getting as far away from Louise as possible.  He gets the job.

That very night Graham’s wife commits suicide by drowning.  His children have been away at school.  When they arrive home, teenage daughter Carol, who has received letters from her mother accusing Graham and Louise of an affair, blames Louise for her mother’s death.  Louise wants to quit but Graham asks her to stay on and help raise his young son.

Years pass and David visits from Canada.  He continues to spurn Louise’s ceaseless advances.  She tries once again to quit her job.  Instead, Graham asks her to marry him.  Although she tells him she doesn’t love him, she agrees to the match.  But David takes to hanging around and soon is seeing the now 20-year-old Carol.  He feels for her what he never felt for Louise.  And so begins Louise’s further descent into madness.

She begins seeing and hearing things and becomes convinced she assisted Graham’s wife to suicide.  In her desperation, Louise launches a chain of events that eventually lands her in a strange city babbling to strangers.

Joan Crawford is completely over the top but it suits Louise’s bizarre character perfectly.  My main trouble with the movie was that it seemed to be asking for sympathy for her plight and painting the man as the villain of the piece and I just couldn’t buy it.  Instead, Louise comes off as an early stand-in for Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction and I felt sorry for David.  If the plot and star appeal, this is certainly a well-made entry in the small noir/melodrama/woman’s picture genre.

Joan Crawford was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress for her performance in Possessed.

Trailer

The Unsuspected
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Bess Meredyth and Ranald MacDougall from a novel by Charlotte Armstrong
1947/USA
Michael Curtiz Productions/Warner Bros.
First viewing/Warner Archive DVD

[box] Althea Keane: Victor’s the only man who can turn my blood to ice water.[/box]

Claude Rains mellifluous voice is put to good use in this enjoyable film noir thriller.

Victor Grandison (Rains) is a radio personality whose speciality is murder mysteries.  He dominates his household, which consists of his heiress niece Matilda (Joan Caufield) and his other more impoverished niece Altea (Audrey Totter) and her husband Oliver (Hurd Hatfield).  Altea, a bad, bad girl, stole Oliver from under the nose of Matilda.

As the story starts, Altea is speaking on the phone to Victor’s secretary when we see a shadowy figure enter the room and the secretary screams.  Altea ignores this and goes onto her next nightclub.  The woman is later found hanging from a rope and her death is ruled a suicide.  We discover that Matilda has also recently been declared dead after a shipwreck.

Enter Steven Howard.  He says that unbeknownst to anyone in the family, Matilda and he were married shortly before she set sail.  He is independently wealthy and not interested in Matilda’s considerable estate.  Victor checks up and his buddy in the police says he is who he claims to be.

But Matilda was rescued by a ship without a radio (??).  When she returns, she has no memory of having married Steven.  Steven takes her to the judge who married them and the hotel where they met but this fails to jog her memory.  He says he will have the marriage annulled and she resumes living in Victor’s mansion.

The rest of the complicated story encompasses the rivalry between the cousins, an investigation of the secretary’s “suicide”, and one or two additional murders.  I will not reveal more.  With Constance Bennett as Victor’s intrepid assistant.

This has quite the cast and the actors all acquit themselves well.  1947 was Audrey Totter’s year for A films apparently, between this and Lady in the Lake, and she always makes a delicious bad girl.  With his mellifluous voice, Rains is memorable as the teller of dark tales on radio.  The cinematography by Woody Bredell is simply gorgeous.

Trailer

Gentlemen’s Agreement
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Moss Hart from the novel by Laura Hobson
1947/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Anne Dettrey: I know dear, and some of your other best friends are Methodist, but you never bother to say it.[/box]

If you like message movies, this is a good one.

Widower Philip Schuyler Green has moved to New York with his mother (Anne Revere) and young son on assignment for a magazine.  The editor (Albert Dekker) wants him to do a series on anti-Semiticism.  The idea actually originated with the editor’s niece Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), a divorcee and schoolteacher.  Philip and Kathy rapidly fall in love.

Philip is stymied for a fresh new angle to tackle his topic.  Then he gets an inspiration.  He will pose as a Jew.  This should be easy because he is new in town, right?  The only people in on the secret are his mother, son, the editor and Kathy.  He introduces himself at work as a Jew.

The reaction to Philip’s announcement is an eye-opener even to him.  He encounters bigotry in the most unexpected places.  His own secretary opens up that she, too, is Jewish and got her job by adopting a Gentile-sounding name.  Yet she resists the idea of the magazines actively pursuing diversity for fear of bringing in the “wrong” people, i.e. unassimilated Jews.  Many doors are covertly closed to him and he has to put up with a lot of comments from supposedly well-meaning people.  His closest ally at work is fashion reporter Anne Dettrey (Celeste Holme), a true free spirit.

Philip’s Jewish childhood friend Dave Goldman (John Garfield) is recently discharged from the service and arrives in town to start a new job.  He must find a place for his family to live though and he is having no luck.  Kathy has a vacant house but it is in an area that is restricted against Jews by an unwritten “gentleman’s agreement”.   Though she thinks of herself as unprejudiced, Kathy refuses to do anything that will rock the boat to fight against the status quo.   When Philip’s son is attacked at school for being Jewish, her reaction is to comfort him by reminding him that he is not Jewish.  This infuriates Philip and they have several arguments.  Can their relationship survive?  With Sam Jaffe as a stand-in for Albert Einstein.

I’m not big on “important” message movies and this is one.  It is undeniable that this is one of the most effective of its genre, however.  The director and screenplay make the characters and story so vivid that the film moves well beyond abstraction.  The speechifying is there but is kept to a minimum.  Worth seeing.

I had seen this before but I couldn’t help rooting for the Gregory Peck character to dump the resolutely conventional Kathy and wind up with the tough Anne, who actually shared his own world view.  I just couldn’t buy Kathy’s last minute conversion.  She had a character that just hated controversy in general and Philip lived for it.   Could the Academy voters have rewarded Celeste Holm’s character at Oscar time?

Gentleman’s Agreement won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Holm) and Best Director.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actor; Best Actress; Best Supporting Actress (Revere); Best Writing, Screenplay; and Best Film Editing.

post-Oscar trailer

The Damned (Les Maudits)
Directed by Réné Clément
Written by Réné Clément, Jacques Rémy, and Henri Jeanson; story by Victor Alexandrov and Jacques Companéez
1947/France
Spéva Films
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea. — H. G. Wells [/box]

This didn’t deliver on the suspense promised by its premise but is interesting nonetheless.

In Oslo in the days immediately preceding the fall of Berlin, a ragtag group of Nazi bigshots hitch a ride on a submarine. The u-boat has orders to take them to South America, where they will try to initiate phase two of the New World Order.  They are Mr. Garosi, an Italian, and his wife Hilde, a German, who communicate with each other in French.  Hilde happens to be the mistress of the Wermacht General on board.  Then there is SS officer Forster and his vicious boy toy Willy Morus, a French collaborator, and a mysterious Scandinavian scholar and his teenage daughter.

Hilde is injured en route so some of them sneak into a French port and kidnap a doctor.  Dr. Guilbert rightly fears for his life and spends his time cooking up ways to make himself indispensable and escape plans.  One of his ploys is to declare an outbreak of contagious disease which forces one of the cabins to be turned into an isolation ward with the passengers forced into even closer quarters than before.  It takes very little to light the flame of discord among them.

By the time the u-boat arrives in South America, Hitler is dead and Berlin has fallen.  The agent (Marcel Dalio) that the Nazis expected to smooth their entry has had a change of heart.  From then on nothing goes right but the Germans in the group remain relentless in their loyalty to the old cause.  This only increases the danger to Guilbert.

If this was intended to be a thriller, it lacked excitement.  As a glimpse into the post-War French mindset it is quite interesting, however, and the film is certainly well-made.  It was recently restored and looks beautiful.

DVD release trailer showing beautiful restoration work

A Man About the House
Directed by Leslie Arliss
Written by Leslie Arliss, John Perry, and J.B. Williams from a novel by Francis Brett Young
1947/UK
British Lion Film Corporation
First viewing/Amazon Instant

This Gaslight-inspired thriller is pretty good.

Agnes and Ellen Islit are two impoverished English spinsters.  Out of the blue, they inherit their long lost uncle’s estate in Italy.  The straight-laced Agnes doesn’t want to have anything to do with the place but reluctantly agrees to the romantic Ellen’s desire to at least see the property.  They arrive with Agnes intent on selling out and returning to England.  Agnes is the prototypical Englishwoman believing that her way is the only correct way of doing things.

Ellen is immediately enchanted but it takes butler Salvatore to make Agnes warm to Italy.  She warms to him at the same time.  But unbeknownst to the women, Salvatore believes the property, which historically belonged to his ancestors, is rightfully his …

This took quite awhile to become a thriller.  It begins as more of a travelogue/romance with Moore being convincing as a life-loving Italian.  The ending is telegraphed.  Quite competently made but not a must view.