I felt a twinge of arousal upon reading that a Warner Archive Bluray of Clarence Brown‘s Possessed (1931), a hard-knocks, rags-to-riches social drama costarring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, will pop on 5.26.
This is a brand new 1080p Bluray, mind…the product of a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative…gimme!
Gable was 30 during filming. He wasn’t yet wearing his pencil-thin moustache (he grew one and kept it the following year), and wasn’t yet a big marquee name — he ascended into that realm with his starring role in Frank Capra‘s It Happened One Night (’34).
Crawford, born in 1904, was 26 or 27.
Brown was known as a reliable “house” director, not exactly given to visual flamboyance or artistic ambition. But consider the second half of this clip (starting at 1:34)…a left-to-right tracking shot of Crawford hungrily eyeballing the lifestyles of the swells as a train slowly passes by. This is a moment of serious cinema, one that took a lot of planning and crackerjack timing to get right.
Lenore Coffee‘s screenplay was adapted from The Mirage, a 1920 Broadway play The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn.
