****SPOILERS**** Looking like a combination homeless bag lady and something that the cat dragged in Louise Howell,Joan Crawford, aimlessly walks the streets of Los Angeles asking and looking for just one thing, the only word that comes out of her mouth, David! Taken to the city's municipal hospital Louise, admitted as a Jane Doe, is declared by the head of psychiatry Dr. Harvey Willard, Stanley Ridge, as suffering from a complete mental breakdown and put under strong medication to bring her both mind and memory back to normal.<br /><br />It's when Louise is being treated with mind altering and psychotic drugs that she remembers what brought her to this state of insanity and it had to do with her former lover confirmed bachelor and swinging construction engineer and part time piano player David Sutton,Van Heflin, the David that Louis was asking for at the beginning of the movie. Louise and David had a hot and sizzling relationship going between them but David felt that it was getting a bit out of hand and wanted to put the breaks on it. This decision on David's part has Louise go off her nut to the point of almost losing both her composer, when David was around, and her ability to look after her and Davids employers Dean Graham's, Raymond Massey, very ill wife Pauline whom Louise, a licensed nurse, was taking care off.<br /><br />Davids hold on Louise is so strong that it totally warps her mind having the love sick woman go into fits of anger and self pity over his treatment of her by wanting to have nothing to do with Louise. It's during this time that Pauline ends up jumping into a nearby lake drowning herself with a mind numbed and guilty conscience Louise feeling responsible for Pauline's death or suicide. while Louise is so stuck up on David she doesn't realize that her boss Mr. Graham has fallen madly in love with her and out of the clear blue sky proposes marriage to a totally surprised Louise.<br /><br />You would have thought that Dean Graham marrying Louise, who grudgingly accepted his proposal, would have straightened her out but it only has the reversed effects with Louise's step daughter Carol, Gerldine Brooks, coming into the picture and into her life. At first Carol was anything but affectionate to her step-mother Louise feeling that she was having an affair with her father Dean Graham behind her mothers back which lead her to kill herself. It took Carol's father Dean to straighten her out on her mothers, and his wife's, tragic death in him being present when she took that one step beyond off the rock and into the lake drowning herself. Louise at the time was nowhere in sight being that it was her day off from her job as Pauline's nurse. It's also told by Carol's father that Pauline was very sick and what she thought or said, about him and Louise having an affair, was just wild and unfounded thoughts that she conjured up in her both sick and confused mind.<br /><br />It's just when it seemed that Louise had her life straightened out with David gone out of it and Carol accepting her as her mother that things really took a downward turn with David unexpectedly showing up again. Stung by the love bug David, back from his job for Mr. Graham in Canada,has gotten really hot for Carol, some 15 years is Junior, and this is something that Louise just wont take lying down or standing up. Louise in trying to split Carol up from David has her turn against her with Carol and David scheduled to tie the knot as soon as possible to just stick it to her intrusive and annoying step-mother.<br /><br />Getting nowhere with Carol in trying to maligned David in what a two-timing rat he is, which is a total lie, Lousie then goes on to confront David threatening to blow him away, with her handgun, if he goes through with his marriage to Carol. David a bit too sure of himself and thinking that Louise won't go through with it calls Louise's bluff which turned out to be the very last thing that he ever did!<br /><br />Back to the present and in the hospital Louise is now in a total vegetable with her mind completely gone. Dean summoned to his wife's bedside can only hope that she'll recover even if she has to face justice in David's untimely death which she'll very probably get off on an insanity defense. Dr. Willard tells a grieving Dean Graham that his wife has a very good chance to recover and that he'll take a personal interest in seeing to it and do everything possible to make it happen.<br /><br />We can only hope with the great advances in mental therapy, since 1947 when the movie "Possessed" was made, and psychiatric studies that what Dr. Willard told Dean Graham turned out to be true.