Possessed
Directed by Clarence BrownMarian Martin works a dead-end job in a small industrial town, living in a cramped boarding house with her mother and enduring the low expectations of her social class. One night, watching a private train pass through on its way to New York, she decides she is done waiting. She walks to the station and boards a train heading east, carrying little more than her nerve.
In New York she becomes the kept mistress of Mark Whitney, a wealthy lawyer with political ambitions and a studied emotional detachment. The arrangement suits both of them until Whitney, unwilling to let a relationship complicate his career, attempts to withdraw. Marian, who has long since passed from calculation into genuine feeling, refuses to accept that the rules of the arrangement apply only when they suit him. A rival political figure, John Driscoll, recognizes her value as a social liability and begins to apply pressure, while Marian's former suitor Al Manning resurfaces from her past life, threatening the careful fiction she has built around herself.
Possessed belongs to the cycle of pre-Code MGM melodramas that used the romantic triangle as a framework for examining class mobility and the costs extracted from women who attempt it. The film does not moralize in the manner of its post-Code successors; it holds the system responsible alongside its characters, and the ending arrives as something closer to negotiation than punishment.
