.png)
This psychological thriller directed by John Brahm stars Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, and Gene Raymond, and was released by RKO Pictures.
The film is based on a screenplay by Sheridan Gibney and adapted from "What Nancy Wanted" by Norma Barzman, wife of later-blacklisted writer Ben Barzman.
The set up is an interrupted wedding, the stuff of nightmares. John Willis (Gene Raymond) is about to marry bride to be Nancy (Laraine Day), but a man named Harry Blair (Brian Aherne) crashes the wedding.
.png)
Blair says that he is Nancy’s former husband and warns Willis that he’s about to marry a thief, a liar, and possibly a murderer. There's a fade and we embark on a journey within the most comprehensive uses of flashback in film noir — a flashback within a flashback within a flashback.
“Never has the device of the flashback been taken so far. Narratives are jumbled up, parentheses opened, exploits slot one inside the other like those Chinese toys sold in bazaars, and the figure of the heroine gradually comes into focus: beneath her somewhat obscure charm there lurks a dangerous and perverse mythomaniac”
Borde & Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 (1955)
.png)
The effect of these flashbacks within flashbacks is to present an entire history as it might unravel suddenly in a person's mind. The film leads up to a catastrophic moment as Nancy attempts to walk down the aisle a second time, after having left a trail of male destruction — receiving a cathartic kind of ending in her collapse.
.png)
It's still her movie however, and she is the victim of her psychosis, brought about by a historic incident with her hard-staring mother.
But there are plenty male victims who seem to go rather nonchalantly unnoticed — there is the man she murders, and there is the man that is electrocuted for the murder — there is the suicide of of her lover and there is the husband that is committed to an insane asylum, in an unusual case of the bride gaslighting the husband.
.png)
.png) |
| Robert Mitchum and Laraine Day in The Locket (1946) |
Feminist case both aside and included — Nancy is a prisoner of the multiple narratives and the multiple narratives are framed as various flashbacks within which she participates as object sometimes and subject at other times.
While presenting as an innocent enough example of the style, The Locket (1946) is likely one of the more extreme and even bizarre examples of a certain type of noir, which studies criminal psychology. The Freudian techniques however, here employed by director John Brahm were never more firmly applied in film noir, than they were in The Locket which could be seen as an extended analytic session with one patient, the disturbed Nancy, played by Laraine Day.
.png)
Nancy is described early on by her previous husband as 'a hopelessly twisted personality' — rich language indeed coming from a psychoanalyst. The flashback sequences make up pretty much all of the film, and are both told about the female — by males. A further flashback springs into Nancy's childhood, leaving a confusing and complex set of tales, the focal point of which is an energising analysis of psychological collapse.
.png)
.png) |
| Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum in The Locket (1946) |
While The Locket (1946) is not a paranoid woman noir in the more common sense of the style, it does present a woman who is psychologically disturbed and haunted — if by anyone, then by herself. Paranoia becomes suddenly evident as the guiding force of the personality of Nancy Monks Blair Patton — played by Laraine Day — as she makes a long and interminable walk down the wedding aisle at the conclusion of the tale.
This long walk down the aisle is supposed to be when every unsupportable facet of her personality manifests itself and the fear and paranoia of being caught and finally exposed as a lifelong kleptomaniac becomes a weight too much to bear.
.png)
.png)
While not the paranoid woman of most film noir features — the type of woman who spends much of her time in bed in a mysterious house, being gaslit and terrorised by her husband, various servants and dead people — Nancy Monks Blair Patton does carry a paranoia which is traced in the film back to the initial incident with her mother when as a child she was accused of stealing a locket.
The Locket (1946) makes an effort to demonstrate how such actions can have recurrent effects and dominate a life, and this is an idea crucial to film nor psychology. The idea is played out on the wedding aisle and the images of Nancy's corrupted and mendacious long life to date are played out on the rug before her, in a fast fading and flashing tableau of faces.
.png)
.png) |
| Film noir —— The Locket (1946) |
When Nancy was a child this is where it all begins. Shortly after Nancy’s father's death Mrs. Willis, a sadistic housekeeper brought on by Nancy's mother accuses innocent little Nancy of stealing a locket. Although Nancy did not do this, Mrs. Willis insists she is guilty and forces a confession out of the intimidated small child. Ugly overtones abound, including a sense of class entitlement, making this scene alone the hinge upon the morality of every action in this noir.
It's a psychological miracle in a manner of speaking that so much can unfold from this moment, that in fact this moment is the film and the life story itself, a piece of magic from which a history evolves. It's captured by a camera angle, as seen from the floor.
.png)
This is incredible because there is no one on the floor. The angle is repeated on Nancy's wedding day, to similar shocking effect — made more dramatic yet because it is filmed inside her bridal veil. In both instances a music box falls on the ground, and reflecting on this scene, it is incredible to think that for both the girl and the woman — the view that we have is that of the music box.
That is to say the point of view of a small music box, whose sweet and mechanical tune rankles and interrupts the moment. The intimate moment between the girl and the woman and the music box on the floor is so purely expressed because it is Nancy's private hell — no one can see it or share it — although the film viewer can.
.png)
The overall jumble of The Locket (1946) is not nearly as difficult to watch as it might sound. It's an eccentric notion for sure, to embed these nested flashbacks, but The Locket gives so much more. In fact there is more conviction in this minor masterpiece a d classic film noir than many give it credit for. Memorable to the last, The Locket is on the surface a gentle watch, with the flashbacks removing the viewer slowly from normative film techniques, to the edge of reason almost — to a breakdown which elicits real pity.
.png)
Everything is within Nancy (Laraine Day) in this second — both in the past as a little girl and in the present on her wedding day. And what could be more symptomatic of film noir than this — a psychologically destructive moment that cannot be seen nor expressed but only felt by the subject.
To avoid seeing the history of film and the golden age in particular as a typically misogynistic procession of ideas which cajole and depress and violate and typecast and oppress the female, it is needful to bear in mind that because of when these films were made — primarily the 1940s and 1950s — that this was a period which acknowledged the differences between men and women.
.png)
That is to say, there is no strict idea of equality in film noir, and to introduce it as a guiding principle for critique is to speculate on notions that came into being decades after the fact of their production. There is in fact more clarity about gender roles in film noir than there is any other style of story-telling before or sense — certainly as far as the modern period goes.
Indeed, to look at film noir gender roles in light of what is portrayed and when it was portrayed, there is more flexibility and variation about the female roles that there are concerning the males. There are also in film noir, better and more substantial and varied roles for women than there may be and may have been in any form of cinema before and since.
After the sexualisation of women in the 1960s and 1970s, and the extinction of a consistent intelligent and satisfactory set of social roles for women in films in the 1980s and beyond — we came in the 21st Century into a set of cul de sacs in which women's roles were still confused — and while positive, still lacked variation as to much care is taken in approaching the subject entirely.
Film noir does not suffer this and in The Locket (1946) — which is in its outputting a varied cod psychological study of one woman whose past ends up causing a huge amount of damage and then collapses on herself — the role of the lead female carries implications.
We may not like these implications — such as the fact that as in several other film noirs, Nancy is the subject of a painting and the painting is the subject of extreme male attention. Painting is objectification and objectification means here that a woman's place is on the wall — subject to the male gaze. At the same time, received thought today is that the male gaze is a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualising and diminishing women.
.png) |
| Robert Mitchum in The Locket (1946) |
However there may be a better way to consider the portrait in film noir as there may be a further layer of ideas beneath. Crucial to note however that the portrait is always of a woman, and we may be hard pressed to uncover a film noir which discusses the portrait of a man — there may be no such thing at all.
The portrait of Nancy in The Locket (1946) serves several purposes other than to be the subject of the gaze. There are in fact other portraits of Nancy in The Locket (1946) which serve to on the surface express the love that the artist character Norman Clyde — played by Robert Mitchum — feels for her. From the off then, there is less implied about the status of women per se, and more is expressed about the nature of art. It is quite normal in fact for artists of all types to immortalise the ones they love — it still goes on.
What is recreated in fact is not the subject of desire in the manner of the portrait in Laura (1944) in which a police detective falls in love with the titular Laura on the basis of a painting. That is a great example of rather unsound behaviour and classic gaze, perhaps.
.png) |
| Laraine Day in The Locket (1946) |
The portraits featured in The Locket (1946) however make more of an effort to contribute to the depth of the story — not in the least because the one which is repeatedly shown and which appears at the suicide of the artist himself, depicts Nancy as Cassandra.
In Greek mythology Cassandra was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed. It's fascinating that this characterisation does not appear to reflect the Nancy of The Locket (1946) in any way at all.
Most notably of all the portrait in the film has no eyes, and so is striking and vaguely horrific — a muted and surreal picture that expresses the exact lack of vision that Nancy has about herself. Unlike Cassandra, Nancy is not predicting anything, and if she is it is her own security, which is ultimately a failure.
The picture, painted by Robert Mitchum himself portraying an artist is not the normal flattering, male-gaze-laden film noir representation of a woman, but is more of a warning as well as a psychological offence to its subject.
Further, Nancy does not even appear to be aware of any effort she is making to conceal her crimes and her back story. She does lie about it, but it does not cause her any trouble. There is a murder which she committed and concealed, and worse, there is a man who is sentenced and electrocuted for this murder — and she carries it well.
And then on top of the serial theft of beautiful lockets — her favourite item to steal — there is the fact that she manages to have her husband — a psychoanalyst — committed to a mental institution. The double-edge nature of this movie is constantly expressed insofar as it does not seem to care about any of its victims — none of them men, whether murdered, stolen from, driven to madness or convicted of crimes they did not commit — seemingly plot points, collateral damage, bodies in the slow-flowing stream of noir.
And nothing seems to suggest that anyone should care about Nancy either, traumatised or guilty, a sweet innocent or a manipulative femme fatale — the jury is out, and the morality is flat, which is unusual for the style — although highly suggestive of the story's Freudian roots.
.png)
“The Locket is a radically ambivalent film… its oscillation between condemnation and sympathy for its central protagonist, draws attention to the processes of narration and to the attempt of male narrators to control the ‘problem’ of femininity.”
Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (2002)
Haunted portraits often feature in golden age Hollywood film noir thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s, but to state that this is always about the sexualisation or belittlement of women is to miss a larger vision. In the film noir classics like Rebecca (1940), Laura (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945) portraits do hold their beholders in thrall, and are an extra-natural extension of love or obsession, more attainable than the subjects themselves.
.png) |
| Robert Mitchum in The Locket (1946) |
Rather than being typical artwork however, portraits in film noir serve something unreal, the element of the fantastic that serves to press psychological virtualities home. Their power is manifold, not just as a representation — which is incidentally what the film itself is — but they are based on technique and also act as plot objects.
.png)
How we view gender roles in total in film noir does depend on whether men and women as genders are different or equal — because noir seems to rely on the fact of their explicit difference. A question not just central to film noir of 1946 but the culture. If women are always the other — the other aspect of the male or its negation — then we can read everything differently — and generally the notion of femininity in film noir is the subject of heavy expression.
Film noir’s peculiar amalgam of sexual angst, morbidity, and the portrait may well find its apogee in another Fritz Lang film, Scarlet Street (1945), in the painfully ironic scene in which the defeated and dispossessed portraitist (Edward G.Robinson) witnesses the sale of what might be called his ‘‘self-portrait as femme fatale,’’ that is, the portrait Chris painted of Kitty ( Joan Bennett) that was exhibited as her self-portrait. The cadaverous image of the woman who stole his meager self-respect, along with the authorship of the painting, and whom he murdered in a fit of sexual jealousy, is borne, funereally, out of the gallery and past the painter, as he shuffles past in a schizophrenic oblivion. The pathological possibilities of mimesis and its subject-object confusions reach so fevered a pitch in Scarlet Street that it’s hard to imagine a sicker scenario…” (pp 17-18).
Susan Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2006)
.png) |
| Laraine Day in The Locket (1946) |
The power of the portrait is also subject to heavy expression, and as such is perfect for film noir, and there is perhaps no depth far too extreme when this subject is under the microscope. What is incredible and must be applauded in Susan Felleman's reading of the power of the portrait in 1940s cinema, is that she is able to view a film noir as containing the sickest scenario that can be imagined — reading that from the encoded power of the style.
.png) |
| Helene Thimig in The Locket (1946) |
The baroque melodrama of The Locket (1946) is in light of this revealed as a powerful and stylised medium rather than a dated and ungainly method of storytelling. Only in such baroque settings can such fantasy in fact take flight.
.png)
Finally, although it is much busier, the interiors used for the house of Mrs. Willis in appear to be the same as those used for the house of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, released by RKO in September 1946. There are in fact art deco interiors in The Locket (1946) which are beautifully filmed by Nicholas Musuraca who does much of the heavy lifting to create the noirish atmosphere which seems at times to eclipse the characters.
A bold ending rounds off this maddeningly good film noir — as we are left to speculate upon what might happen to Nancy. She is guilty of some serious crimes, that has been established, and she also has a future, which will likely involve healing, but could as easily not.
Cinematography by Nicholas MusuracaEdited by J.R. WhittredgeMusic by Roy WebbProduction company RKO Radio PicturesDistributed by RKO Radio PicturesRelease date of December 20, 1946Running time is 85 minutes
No comments:
Post a Comment