The Locket (1946)
Directed by John Brahm

Film Review

One of the most unsettling and sophisticated of film noir dramas, The Locket takes the familiar noir device of the flashback and uses it with great ingenuity to build suspense and convey a sense of slowly mounting paranoia which makes it hard for the audience to distinguish truth from fantasy.  The idea of the flashback within a flashback is carried to its ultimate extreme, sending us deeper and deeper into the labyrinthine passages of the mind, until we feel as lost, confused and chilled as the protagonists in the drama.  The intricately constructed narrative is both compelling and disturbing and when the great unravelling comes, in the superbly staged denouement, it feels like an assault, as though reality has suddenly been turned inside out.  Rarely has a film noir played psychological games with its audience as effectively, as ruthlessly as this film.

The Locket is one of a series of exceptionally well-crafted films made in the 1940s by director John Brahm.  Brahm's previous credits include The Lodger (1944), an impressive remake of Hitchcock's silent classic, and Hangover Square (1945), another fine example of film noir, albeit one set in another epoch.  In the '50s and '60s, Brahm took his directing talents to television, where he contributed to the success of many great series, notably Alfred Hitchcock Presents, General Electric Theater, The Twilight Zone, Thriller and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. 

The Locket offers Laraine Day her most interesting screen role, an enigmatic femme fatale who is completely obvious to the harm she causes, and also features impressive contributions from Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum and Gene Raymond.  The script was written by Norma Barzman, although, as she was on the Hollywood blacklist, the film was credited to Sheridan Gibney.  Not only is the film an inspired use of the film noir aesthetic to explore psychological disorder (far more convincingly than any other film of this period), it also offers a powerful indictment of American social attitudes in the 1940s, presaging the many great films that Douglas Sirk would make in the following decade.

Film Synopsis

On the day of his marriage to his true love Nancy, John Willis receives an unexpected visit from a man who claims to be his future wife's former husband.  The man, a psychiatrist named Dr Blair, reveals that Nancy is a habitual liar and thief, a woman who has already destroyed three men.  It all began when Nancy was a little girl, when the woman whom her mother worked for as a housemaid accused her of stealing a valuable locket from her daughter.  Blair recounts how another man, a struggling artist, fell under Nancy's spell and discovered that not only is she a kleptomaniac but also an unconscionable murderer...