The Locket (1946)

The Locket
Directed by John Brahm
Written by Sheridan Gibney
1946/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Warner Archive DVD

[box] Norman Clyde: I really didn’t mean to be offensive.

Nancy Monks Blair Patton: That hardly seems possible.[/box]

Laraine Day makes for an overly wholesome femme fatale in this film noir but Robert Mitchum and Brian Aherne are sufficiently doomed to make up for it.

This film uses the flashback within a flashback within a flashback technique.  It is less confusing than it sounds.

The story begins on the day Nancy (Day) is to wed John Willis (Gene Raymond). Psychiatrist Dr. Blair (Aherne) asks for a rush audience with the groom right before the ceremony.  Blair tells Willis that his intended has already wrecked the lives of at least three men until now.  Blair says he should know because he was one of them, having been married to Nancy for five years.  This is the first that Willis has heard of Nancy’s marital history.  He has a hard time believing his ever-smiling bride-to-be could lie to him.

Blair begins to tell the whole story.  Here we flashback into Blair’s meeting with Nancy’s ex-boyfriend Norman Clyde (Mitchum).  As Clyde tells Blair his own sad story, we segue into another flashback with voice-over narration by Clyde.  It seems that he caught Nancy with a very valuable diamond necklace in her handbag after a party during which the jewels went missing.  Nancy admits to stealing the gems and begins to explain the roots of her kleptomaniac tendencies to Clyde.

Segue into still another flashback.  As a child, Nancy lived in a wealthy household where her mother was housekeeper.  She became friends with the daughter of the family.  On the daughters birthday, she gave little Nancy her own gift, a locket,  in compensation for being left out of the girl’s  party.  The girl’s mother abruptly snatches the locket, a valuable family heirloom, back.  Nancy reacts badly to losing her prize to say the least.  Then the locket goes missing.  Nancy is the prime suspect.  Even though Nancy’s mother eventually finds the locket in the folds of the daughter’s dress, her boss forces Nancy to confess to stealing it.  Clyde buys this tale of childhood trauma, mails the necklace Nancy took back and says no more about it.

There is another jewel theft at a party Nancy attends, this time under circumstances Clyde cannot so easily overlook.  Nancy cannot deal with Clyde’s suspicions and the pair breaks up.  Blair, who buys the childhood trauma story hook line and sinker, refuses to believe his wife erred a second time.  I will spoil no more.  Suffice it to say that Nancy eventually drags Blair through hell.  With Lillian Fontaine, mother of Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavilland, as a British countess.

It would be hard for anyone not to be fooled by Day’s all-American good looks and Junior League manners.  In that regard, I suppose she suited the part nicely.  I would have liked a few glimpses of evil in her personality along with her wicked actions, however.  Everybody else in the film is just fine and it is an entertaining mystery.  RKO’s resident noir greats Nicholas Musuraca and Roy Webb did the cinematography and music.

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