Walking the lonely streets of the big city at dawn, Joan Crawford is the tormented heroine of Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed (1947), another disturbing tale of Post War domesticity coming apart of the scenes. In the opening shots of the film, in a beautifully designed sequence shot mostly from her character’s point-of-view, Crawford is wheeled into a mental hospital and dispassionately examined by a series of baffled doctors; she has completely “shut down,” and no one can figure out why. You’ll have to see the film for yourself to discover the answer; suffice it to say that, as with Leave Her To Heaven, any film that depicts such a disquieting vision of society in freefall is inextricably linked to the social milieu that created it.