Review of The Locket (1946)

The 1946 film noir “The Locket” hasn’t been released on disc anywhere outside of Spain, causing it to slip ever further into the status of footnote, unvaryingly and almost exclusively during discussions of flashbacks. That’s not without reason, as “The Locket” features an outwardly intimidating triple-layer flashback structure, but the film has much more to offer including a very Hitchcockian treatment of tension, suspicion and psychology.

The film begins with John Willis about to marry Nancy (Laraine Day), a mysterious but charming woman that the Willis’s extended family knows next to nothing about. The prenuptial party is crashed by psychiatrist Harry Blair (who has the poor taste to reduce the wedding to mere framing device) who claims that Nancy is his ex-wife and a deeply unstable murderess. Dr. Blair relates how he was visited in his office by a Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum), an uncompromising artist who was once very much in love with Nancy until he began to suspect she was a compulsive kleptomaniac who once killed to cover up a theft. He traces her disorder to a childhood incident she once confessed (via flashback once again) in which she was falsely accused of stealing a locket from a rich girl.

The story, even as vague as I’ve outlined, may seem needlessly complex. After all, the plot could have been told in chronological order from Nancy’s point of view growing up and dealing with her troubles or from the perspective of an investigator hired by Willis’s family to determine the background of John’s fiancée. By nesting flashbacks inside each other, however, the film effectively reverses chronology. The journey deeper into Nancy’s past becomes a probe into her mind, peeling away layers on a quest for the truth behind her pleasant and unassuming exterior.

The flashbacks also cause the earliest scene to be literally the centerpiece of the film; elevating it to the importance it is due with respect to cinema’s infatuation with Freudian psychology. The title also lends weight to this crucial childhood incident. Thankfully, director John Brahm does a fine job of the scene, taking what may seem a minor incident and using it as the kernel from which much strife will germinate. While the child actors are about what you’d expect in terms of talent, Brahm builds just the right tone out of the condescension of adults, the emotional fragility of children and the overwhelming trauma when young innocence first confronts bald injustice.

Of course, the movie wouldn’t be any fun if simply recalling the original trigger event cured the present repercussions, the all-too-common anticlimax of several similar films (gialli, I’m looking at you). “The Locket” instead ramps up the tension, by showing how knowledge of Nancy’s kleptomania only causes her successive lovers to be beleaguered with doubt. As we gradually backtrack out of the nested flashbacks, each man loses Nancy, finds their clueless successor and infects him with a tale that is treated with initial skepticism, but spreads like a viral paranoia.

[Images: Brahm likes his brooding window shots.]

This is where the Hitchcock feel really kicks in. John Brahm, whose frequently overlooked noir credentials include “The Lodger” (1944) and “Hangover Square” (1945), constructs plenty of delightful scenes in which the hapless menfolk remain just out of reach of confirming their suspicions about Nancy, but fail until some perversely unexpected moment. Meanwhile, Nancy, who compulsively and often convincing lies to cover her tracks, has the infuriating tendency to believe herself. She’s like an inadvertent femme fatale who isn’t even aware of her own crimes or bizarre agenda.

It’s a fun plot with little excesses that fans of film noir will appreciate (amongst them, one of my favorite filmic suicides in recent memory), but far too much contrivance to please the straight drama crowd. The screenplay is quite talky, especially with all the layers of flashbacking narrators, and although it doesn’t rely on crackling wit, the dialogue relishes in the clashes between characters. It brings out the theme of disparity between certainty and truth that is seen in Nancy’s self-serving delusions, the men’s defense of her honor and the fatal accusation that set it all in motion.

"The Locket" is the type of screenplay that somehow has Robert Mitchum as a sensitive painter discussing his artistic integrity, where it’s inevitable that the cocky psychiatrist will be driven crazy and that doesn’t mind telling you point blank that the locket is just a symbol for the unconditional love Nancy needs (the source novel is even called “What Nancy Wanted”). Oh, and for a film noir, it’s odd that we never actually see a gun. Is it great writing? Maybe not. But it’s awfully good storytelling.

Walrus Rating: 8.5