The Locket (RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Danger in the Dorm I broke off watching Lifetime’s next production – something called The Bad Orphan that seemed like too much of a ripoff of The Bad Seed – and instead turned the TV back on at 9:15 p.m. for a Turner Classic Movies showing on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program of the 1946 film The Locket. The Locket was based on a real-life incident in the childhood of writer Norma Barzman, in which one of her best friends was the daughter of the housekeeper of the well-to-do George Peabody Gardner and his sister Belle. The housekeeper’s daughter was accused of stealing a valuable locket belonging to George’s daughter, the Gardners fired the housekeeper, and the daughter grew up to be a troubled young woman, a kleptomaniac and a victim of clinical depression. Barzman wrote a screen treatment of this story called What Nancy Wanted, and actor Hume Cronyn bought the rights intending it as a vehicle for his wife, Jessica Tandy. Then he sold it to RKO, where the project was taken over by executive producer Jack J. Gross (who crossed swords with Val Lewton over his desire to put “name” horror stars like Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi into Lewton’s films), who assigned Bert Granet to produce and Sheridan Gibney to rewrite Barzman’s script (though apparently the only change Gibney made was to move the World War II service of two of the characters from the U.S. to Britain).

As director Granet borrowed John Brahm from 20th Century-Fox; Brahm was essentially Fritz Lang Lite, though he certainly knew his way around Gothic horror and had proven it with back-to-back masterpieces at Fox, The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). He threw his full armamentarium of tricky camera effects and chiaroscuro lighting into The Locket, and Nicholas Musuraca, one of the two master noir cameramen at RKO (Harry Wild, who shot Murder, My Sweet, was the other), was the cinematographer. The main problem with The Locket is that all the visual stylistics overwhelm the relatively simple story, though it’s told in an unusual structure that involves a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It begins on the eve of the wedding of Nancy Patton (Laraine Day, quite good in a role both Olivia de Havilland and her sister Joan Fontaine wanted, though maybe they asked for too much money for Bert Granet’s budget) to John Willis (Gene Raymond, billed fourth and making his return to the screen following service in World War II). Willis has an unexpected visitor at the pre-wedding party, who insists on speaking to him alone. The visitor is Dr. Harry Blair (Brian Aherne, adopting the imperious gentlemanliness of Herbert Marshall), who explains that he was Nancy’s previous husband for five years until she had him fraudulently committed to a mental institution, following which she divorced him (a glitch in the plot because you can’t divorce someone who’s been adjudged insane) and went on her merry way until she hooked up with John.

Blair tells John that he was visited in turn by painter Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum, billed third; he was an RKO contract player who’d achieved overnight stardom and an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in the war film The Story of G.I. Joe, made on loanout to Lester Cowan and United Artists; once RKO got him back they weren’t sure what to do with him, though film noir would turn out to be his niche once they cast him in Out of the Past a year later). Norman was teaching art classes in the middle of the Depression – he didn’t want to waste his time teaching when he could be doing, but he needed the money. Nancy got dragged to one of his classes by a fellow student, and she brought along a sketch pad that impressed Norman with her work. Norman asked her for a date and ultimately fell in love with her and proposed, only at a reception given for aspiring young artists by critic and collector Drew Bonner (Ricardo Cortez), a valuable jeweled bracelet owned by Bonner’s wheelchair-using wife (Fay Helm) disappears during the evening and Norman later discovers it in Nancy’s bag. Then, at a later party, Bonner is mysteriously murdered; another man is arrested, convicted and set to be executed for the crime, but the night before the execution Norman goes to Dr. Blair’s office and tells him the story of his affair with Nancy as a flashback within a flashback. The flashback within the flashback within the flashback is told by Nancy herself and relates to events in her childhood (in which she’s played by Sharyn Moffet). She was the daughter of the housekeeper for grande dame Mrs. Willis (Katherine Emery), whose daughter Karen (Gloria Donovan) gave Nancy a diamond-studded locket as a present, only Karen’s mom forced Nancy to give back the locket and later accused Nancy of stealing it, physically attacked Nancy and fired Nancy’s mom (rendering them homeless as well) over the incident even though the locket later turned up in the folds of Karen’s dress.

At the finish of Norman’s flashback narration, and after the newspapers have already announced the execution of the man who was convicted of Bonner’s murder, Norman throws himself out the window of Dr. Blair’s office several stories up in a high-rise, killing himself. The film then returns to the present, on the wedding day of John and Nancy, and Dr. Blair watches the two of them together and comments sardonically that John is going to make the very same mistakes all the previous men in Nancy’s life have made, and she’s going to ruin him. That no doubt is where a modern-day filmmaker, not hamstrung by Production Code limitations, would have ended it, but the Code decreed that Nancy must pay for her sins. This happens when Nancy finally realizes, as her mother-in-law to-be pins on her the very same locket Nancy and Karen had fought over lo those many years ago, that she is the same woman who tormented her unjustly and set in motion all her mental issues. She collapses as her previous life flashes before her eyes as she walks to the altar, and Dr. Blair painstakingly explains to John that Nancy’s real problem is that she’s never been loved, but if John will stand behind her she can be cured. TCM “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller said after the movie that The Locket was one of at least three films that year – the others were Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Lewis Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers – which dealt with repressed memories coming back to life and haunting the characters in the present. The Locket was made at the height of Sigmund Freud’s influence over Hollywood and, like a lot of other films of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (up to and including Rebel Without a Cause), it seems to be a parable-like illustration of Freud’s basic theories on how the human psyche develops and how sexual repression plays a part in that. But the film The Locket most reminded of is one Hitchcock made almost two decades later, Marnie, which is also about a woman who becomes a kleptomaniac because she was abused as a child – and both films are flawed but The Locket, for all the parts of it that seemed to be spliced together with baling wire and duct tape, is the better movie of the two.

Laraine Day turns in a top-notch performance – it was, not surprisingly, her favorite of her own films – though the men in it are decidedly off-kilter. Gene Raymond hardly seems even to be there; Brian Aherne is working too hard to present himself as an island of sanity in a sea of madness; and Robert Mitchum seems painfully aware of how miscast he is and responds by giving one of his most somnolent performances. One (this one, anyway) can’t help thinking it should have been Humphrey Bogart in Mitchum’s role and Herbert Marshall in Aherne’s! As things go, too little use is made of Ricardo Cortez, who was no stranger to film noir (he’d played Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931, and had done so quite capably even though hardly at Bogart’s level), and it’s never made clear just how Cortez’s character died. Did Nancy shoot him in cold blood? Did she kill him in justifiable self-defense after he tried to rape her? (The writers did communicate, even within the Production Code limits, that he’d long wanted to make her his mistress, but she had refused.) Or did he shoot himself after being overwhelmed by Nancy’s latest rejection? (The shot in which the gun falls out of his bed after his body is removed, with no sign of whoever may have held it, had me thinking that he’d committed suicide and dropped the gun as he expired.) The Locket is a haunting film, made even more so by its narrative loose ends – including whether Nancy deliberately set out to seduce the son of the woman who’d tormented her as a child or it was sheer coincidence – and the sheer aplomb with which it is staged, even though it’s all strung together on the threads of a plot that barely makes sense, however much it had its roots in the reality of Norma Barzman’s friend. (Barzman, incidentally, was taken off the credits due to the Hollywood blacklist, which ensnared both her and her husband Ben, and though her credit was supposed to be restored, both The Film Noir Encyclopedia and the print shown on TCM give Sheridan Gibney sole credit as writer.)