In Wheeler Auditorium.

Admission: $2.50

Rudi Fehr arrived in Hollywood in 1936. In Germany, he had been a film editor since 1931, as well as a band leader and jazz record collector (today Rudi Fehr's record collection is one of the world's finest - the soundtrack for Bogdanovich's Paper Moon is nothing more, or less, than one rare Fehr disc after another). He went to work as an assistant editor at Warner Brothers, and in 1940 became a full-fledged editor, cutting such forties classics as Watch on the Rhine, Humoresque, Key Largo and Possessed. In 1950, he was elevated by Jack Warner to Associate Producer status, and until his retirement in 1976 he was in charge of all Post-Production at Warner Brothers. He continues to work as an editorial consultant on many projects, and has just returned from Europe where he supervised the foreign language adaptations of Superman in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Possessed
Possessed is an example of Warner Brothers craftsmanship at its finest, directed by German-born Kurt Bernhardt and edited by his fellow emigre Rudi Fehr. At a recent American Film Institute screening, Stephen Zito noted:

“Outrageous, beautifully crafted, passionate, and extravagantly entertaining, this story of unrequited love, schizophrenia, and murder is told... in a baroque style and acted with cold, hysterical conviction by Joan Crawford who the year before had won an Oscar for her unsympathetic role in Mildred Pierce. She goes about her work as if she had designs on another. Her portrait of a woman in extremis, however calculated and bizarre, nevertheless has a cumulative power and a sometimes inspired observation, due perhaps to the fact that prior to filming she spent six weeks in L.A. County Hospital observing schizophrenics who were under the influence of sodium pentothal.”