Movie of the Week: Possessed (1931)

This week, wealthy Clark Gable’s in love with Joan Crawford’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks factory worker in Possessed (1931).

Crawford is Marion Martin, a disillusioned small town factory worker looking for something better. After a chance meeting with Wallace Stewart (Skeets Gallagher), a drunk Park Avenue man on a train, she heads to New York to fulfill her dreams. He advises her to meet a rich man or she’ll never get along in the city. She takes his advice to heart and when two of Stewart’s friends show up, she squeezes her way into meeting them. Gable appears about fifteen minutes in the film as Mark Whitney, a distinguished attorney. He takes a shining to her almost immediately, despite the fact that she admits to him that she is only after his money. A few years pass and she is Mark’s “kept” lover, taking on all the responsibilities of a wife but without a ring. She has smoothed her rough edges and is now sophisticated and elegant. But Mark is hesitant to marry her because he already went through a nasty divorce some years prior and doesn’t want another scandal while he is trying to enter politics. She becomes ashamed to be his mistress and when she realizes that she is standing in his way of becoming governor, she unselfishly leaves him, letting him believe that she isn’t in love with him anymore.

Having starred together previously in Dance Fools Dance and Laughing Sinners, Clark and Joan had grown quite close and their affair was full blown during production of this film, despite Clark being married to Ria and Joan to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. “[Director Clarence Brown] sensed the volcanic attraction between his stars and used that for all it was worth. In the picture Clark and I were supposedly madly in love. When the scenes ended, the emotion didn’t.”

Their scenes are indeed steamy. 1931 was the height of the pre-Production-Code era and this film didn’t try to hide what “services” Joan was providing Clark for her pricey Manhattan apartment, furs, gowns and jewels.

This is a good film for what it is. It really is more like a TV soap opera episode more than a feature, but when you’re talking about the early 1930’s, that’s the case with most of these little dramas; they were churned out like a production line. Possessed was shot in just 26 days and was one of Clark’s TWELVE pictures made in 1931.

The plot here is a bit creaky, as modern audiences wouldn’t understand a story that completely centers around the fact that a man is sleeping with a woman and won’t marry her. Her hometown ex-boyfriend is horrified when he learns that she’s a “kept woman” and declares he won’t marry her as he doesn’t want “secondhand goods.” Yikes.

Clark is wearing too much makeup here but otherwise is quite sexy. He’s wearing tuxes, taking Joan passionately in his arms, brooding over her…what else could you want?

Joan’s never looked better, draped in jewels and gowns and all the latest in couture that probably had all the Depression-era housewives swooning in the cinema. Her dramatic bow coat in the final scene is my personal favorite.

This role was run-of-the-mill for her, as “shopgirl-makes-good” roles were her bread and butter through the 1930’s. But hey, if it works, it works. She goes from ordering roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy and apple pie with chocolate ice cream to organizing fancy dinner parties in French in a Manhattan penthouse.

The heat between Clark and Joan was too much. As writer Adela Rogers St. Johns famously said, their affair “almost burned Hollywood down.” MGM head honcho Louis B. Mayer would not tolerate immorality in his stables and so swapped Clark out of what was to be his next picture opposite Joan, Letty Lynton, and replaced him with Robert Montgomery. Clark was sent to do Hell Divers instead.

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