Possessed: Suite (1947)

“In a psychological drama like Possessed (Warner Brothers, 1947), the problems of film scoring are more subtle. There are very few external events to be illustrated; mostly states of mind, conditions of feeling – the composer had to get inside the characters. Joan Crawford plays an emotionally unbalanced young woman with an unreciprocated love for an engineer, played by Van Heflin. A number of times during the picture Heflin plays the piano – a passage from Robert Schumann’s Carnival. Frequently in the underscoring, I used that piece as an expression of Ms. Crawford’s attachment to Heflin.”

“At the point in the film where she realizes that he really doesn’t love her, which is the point at which she begins to crack up, Heflin plays the Schumann piece again. He is apparently playing it correctly, but what the audience hears this time is a distorted version, omitting all the sharps and flats, which suggests what Crawford is hearing. Here the distortion of the music was meant to correspond to the distortion of normal emotions.”

“I think composers must take advantage of all suggestive powers of music. It is a way of reaching audiences very directly.”

— Franz Waxman