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 They tell us that Joan Crawford got nominated for an Academy Award for her role
as a "spinster who becomes obsessed with a lover who no longer wants her."
Crawford plays Louise Howell, who is a "solitary, emotionally unstable private
nurse that embarks on a largely one-sided affair with callous bachelor David
Sutton[.]" He gets tired of Louise and she tries to regain his affections, but
this only results in her going crazy. There's also a murder involved here.
Joan claimed that she worked harder on this film than any other she ever did
and they include a couple of quotes from papers saying she was very good in
this one. 1947, 108 minutes, VHS
As someone just starting out in the beginning stages of schizophrenia, the
voices in my head kept telling me that I should check out this movie starring
Joan Crawford as a woman who goes off her rocker because of her obsession with
Van Heflin. With his boyish good looks and roguish charm, Van probably should
have come with a warning label or something because it wasn't just Joanie that
went down the tubes when he sashayed into town. I think most of my various
personalities recall Van when he was raising a ruckus and strutting around
Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers . In that film, just by wrecking his car in his old hometown, he was able to
dredge up a quarter-century old murder, get the town's richest woman and the
district attorney to die in a murder suicide gimmick, hook up with grade B film
noir blonde hoochie, Lizabeth Scott and make it out of town to live another
day. Van doesn't really get quite as much done in this movie and actually gets
his ass shot off for his troubles, but he does get Joan Crawford to
disintegrate beautifully from a healthy, emotionally needy nurse to deranged
rich dame that imagines things and suffers from enormous mood swings. Just to
make sure that there's no confusion, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor
that Joan was so good at playing this role because she herself was suffering
from post traumatic stress disorder from her stint as a co-star with John Wayne
in the war time fiasco called Reunion In France (though who could blame her if she did, after all, I'm still on Wellbutrin
because of it). Despite being chemically leveled off, I was still able to
enjoy this movie. If it's one thing we all know from our own experience, it's
that crazy people are extremely entertaining. I don't mean that they're
entertaining in a carny freak kind of way. Obviously they have severe problems
not of their own making and should be helped and pitied. They shouldn't be
gawked at like they were Crab-Boy and the dog-faced girl. Watching whackos is
more akin to watching my other favorite Bob Saget show, American's Funniest Home Videos. Who doesn't enjoy seeing guys take pool balls in their junk and getting bit
by
geese? Seeing the crazies do their thing is pretty much the same thing. It's
funny in a "there but for the grace of God go I" kind of way, right?  Joan plays Louise, a nurse that takes care of a crabby old rich hag and who
dates
Van Heflin on the side. Van plays David Sutton who is not to be confused with
former pitcher Don Sutton. While David is afflicted with Louise's unwanted
attentions, Don is afflicted with the worst perm you've ever seen this side of
one of the Brady men. David is one of those single guys that likes hanging out
with dames so long as they know that it ain't anything too serious. He's an
engineer of some sort and is prone to saying stuff like "I know two plus plus
is always four" and expects Louise too understand why this means they'll never
be married. Of course, since she's really needy and is way too busy
embarrassing herself by saying stuff like "I have no pride" she fails to see
the logic in David's pithy little sayings. Watching him try and ditch her
while she steadfastly refused, reminded me of one of my stalkers I had years
ago. She was a pretty ugly sort and I did her a favor and took her to a dance
or something as part of my community service and the next thing you know she's
always calling me and coming by and demanding that I take her out the airport
at night so she can take a flight on Air Hunk and I had already turned in my
community service to the court and didn't want no part of her. So I ditched
her. This is a separate incident from where I ditched another chick and she
busted
out the "What about us? Don't I have a say in this?" There were some other
stalking incidents with other skanky gals, but I'll always remember my first.
So, I could identify with David when she was bawling and promising all sorts of
stuff like, "I'll be as big a doormat as you want" and David tells her that
she's such a psycho that he's taking a job up in Canada. Now I was just up in
Canada not too long ago and I can tell you two things about Canadians. First
of all, they love donuts. Everywhere you went up there you saw these Tim
Horton's stores. Every time I went in to each Tim Horton's to investigate
whether their donuts were any better than ours (they are pretty good), I would
see all these Canadians waving around their worthless Monopoly-style money
demanding to feed their fat not-quite-British faces, while I just flashed my
USA identification at them and moved to the front of the line. The other thing
you need to realize when you go up there is that they are fairly lazy people.
None of their stinking stores open up until about ten in the morning. Being an
American go-getter, I was up at 5:00 a.m. ready to go to Toys R Us, but these
guys were still sleeping off last night's donut binge. One last aside is that
it was a lot tougher getting back into the good old U.S. of A than getting into
Canada. That's probably a good idea since we don't want to let any sleepy
foreigners slip in and eat up all our donuts.  One of my more organized personalities has just chipped in with the fact that I
should point out that this movie is told in flashback. Everything starts with
a very wan-looking Louise wandering around town looking for David. She stops
men in the street and thinks they are this David guy and eventually passes out
in a diner (don't ever do that at a Tim Horton's). She gets hauled off to the
hospital and the doctors shoot her up with some magic drugs to make her start
talking. She's been traumatized by something and can barely respond, but you
know how women are, so pull up a chair and settle in for awhile because she's
about to unload over an hour an half worth of her pathetic life story on you.
Back in the past
David finally told her to get to stepping so she went back to being a nurse
to this nasty rich woman and it just so happens that this woman's husband knows
David. This is how David gets hooked up with this tour of duty in the Great
White North leaving Louise and her mean old patient. But that patient isn't
mean for long and before you know it, they're pulling her bloated carcass out
of the lake that her fancy home sits on. A coroner's inquest rules that it
was all a big suicide and that Louise is free to scheme her way into being the
widower's new and even crazier wife. There is a bit of a hitch to all of this
though (isn't there always?). Seems that this old coot went and had himself a
couple of kids before his wife took ill. One of them is young lady named
Carol. Carol is one of those spoiled twerps that gets all uppity whenever her
daddy starts sniffing around a new piece of hooch and fires off the
remarkably cliched "you'll never replace my mother" bombs on Louise. This
gets Carol the yellow slapped right off her teeth by her kindly old man, Dean
Graham. Carol pouts and goes back to school. Later David returns and gets
himself slapped by Louise for dumping again (this about the fourth time he's
told her that it is o-ver) and she spazs out, but recovers just enough to
accept Dean's wedding proposal, even after telling Deano that she doesn't love
him (Hey, babe as long as you give daddy the good stuff, you can love whomever
you want!). I guess Dean wants to marry her because he was lonely and what
better way to alleviate that than to marry a chick that has the personality of
about ten different chicks. 
Before the big wedding, Louise goes to see Carol and does one of those deals
where she says that she won't marry Dean if it is going to make Carol unhappy.
Naturally, Carol feels a little guilty in spite of being a spoiled ungrateful
brat, that she might cause her dad to be really lonely so she relents and says
she'll support Dean and Louise and the marriage is back on! Guess who shows up
at the reception? Big David Sutton hisself! He wasn't invited, but he heard
about an open bar in the neighborhood, so here he is. Guess who he hits on
when he's there? The very young and eligible Carol! Guess who sees this and
is ready to soil her wedding gown? The very married to a man she doesn't love
and unstable Louise! She tells David to get lost and quit sniffing around
Carol, so he and Carol immediately start dating. In spite of all this good
news (loveless marriage, ex-boyfriend you're obsessed with is dating your new
husband's younger and sexier daughter) Louise seems to be getting worse
mentally. She has fits of anger, she hears things (tick tock tick tock - what
was that - was that David saying he loves me?) and best of all for us is that
she is now beginning to see things! What does she see? Well, after an
unfortunate encounter at a piano recital with David and Carol (Do they have open
bars at piano recitals or something?) she leaves and waits for Carol to come
home. When Carol comes home, she sees her making out with David. Once Carol
is in the house and upstairs there is a confrontation where Louise finally
admits that she killed Carol's mom just to land Dean in an effort to make David
jealous and come back to her (That sounds a like a winner to me!). Carol says
she's going to tell her daddy (Ohmigod! Louise hadn't counted on that plot
twist!) and she heads down the stairs. As soon as I saw the stairs, I said to
myself, "spoiled brat tattletale - going down!" Sure enough, Carol takes a
header and lands on her baby skull (These old movies always used the falling
down the stairs routine. I've seen evil relatives take the trip, I've seen
washed up singers get chucked, and I've even seen chicks toss themselves down
the stairs when they were preggers!) It all turns out to be just some fantasy
of Louise's and Carol comes home and is fine. Later Louise would confess to
her husband that she killed his first wife anyway, but he would remind her that
it all happened when it was her day off and she was out of town. Louise is
relieved to hear this and they take a trip back to the home where the first
wife suicided so that they can relax and so that Louise's stress levels can go
down. Sounds like that's exactly what she needs! Louise of course never gets better (crazy people never do, you know) and things
play out to their tragic conclusion (well, it's tragic for David anyway). At
first glance, you would assume that this movie is prime territory for Joan to
go way over the top with her performance and live up to the caricature that
modern audiences probably have of her and her films (thanks Faye), but the job
she did here is great and stands up with all the other nutbags that actors have
played since. She is able to move convincingly along the spectrum of emotions
and actions that someone who is going crazy might have to endure (trust me, I
been there). Sometimes she seems fine, sometimes angry, sometimes inconsolably
sad, and sometimes all three of these things within moments of each other.
What's interesting in the way her character is written is that she actually
realizes that something is wrong with her and even surreptitiously seeks help
from a doctor for her condition, making her someone you can care about and
believe in as a character. She doesn't follow up with any treatment though and
her husband is an overly nice guy that thinks she just needs to relax, so she
just keeps getting worse. The movie doesn't cheat and have her go nuts all at
once or even has her do anything spectacular when she is nuts. She slips in
and out of sanity as the movie progresses, each episode worse and lasting
longer than the last until she finally goes all the way under the quicksand of
mental illness. Van Heflin's character is not the nicest guy in the world,
but the movie doesn't portray him as a soulless cad and David comes off as a
guy who just didn't love Louise and eventually found love with someone else.
It makes things resonate all the more that when the two have their final
confrontation, it isn't just some player getting his just deserts and some
crazy broad getting revenge, but is actually the destruction of two lives that
still had potential. A surprisingly prescient movie for its time in showing
the dangers of leaving mental illness untreated (Them crazy folks'll kill you!)
with Crawford handling the fine line between portraying a real person suffering
from these problems and simply being a scenery-chewing character with great
aplomb. If you've never been a fan of Joanie's work or thought she was more
reputation than talent, you should definitely check this one out.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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