The Locket (1946)
Aug. 21st, 2010 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersLike Inception (2010), The Locket is perhaps notable more for its elaborate structure and visual pleasures than for the somewhat banal story it tells. But instead of Inception's dream-within-a-dream structure, The Locket's structure is a flashback-within-a-flashback that goes down three levels, with each flashback from another character's point of view. As with Inception we return to the current time frame level by level, giving closure to each flashback along the way, and the question of closure lingers over this neat narrative gimmick. For one thing, the deeper the flashback, the further the narrative drifts from the person allegedly narrating -- second hand, third hand, fourth hand -- thus raising the question of reliability as well. There is also a murder in one flashback that we're never sure is actually solved. At the center of it all is the femme fatale, Nancy, a kleptomaniac living in a delusional world. Unlike other Freudian movies of the '40s (e.g., Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945)), it's not clear that Nancy's trauma is healed by bringing it to the surface. In fact, the memory only seems to cause further trauma.
'In this sense, I would argue, the genres of the fantastic, the uncanny, the gothic are almost invariably present whenever there is a painted portrait in a film, insofar as it casts a radical uncertainty around what is alive and what is dead, it installs at the heart of the filmic representation a memento mori. I am stressing this, perhaps overstressing it, because of that other dialogue which takes place in every film featuring a painting, namely that between the cinema and the art over which it supposedly triumphs: in this respect, a painting in a film tends to evoke the gesture of a David, raising aloft the slain head of Goliath, and passing it around for everyone to see. Is this, one wonders the reason why Hollywood films, when connoting 'art' invariably resort to bad painting, to the most hackneyed idioms of C19th salon painting, queasily hovering between neo-classical pomposity and photographic realism, what Marc Vernet has described as the 'portrait psycho-pompe'? The argument would be that such films are in some measure the revenge of the cinema on painting, celebrating the cinema's own myth of artlessness and naturalness by emphasizing the artifice of the other, drawing new life by warming itself at the ashes of a pictorial form the cinema helped to consume. But I'm suggesting that the inverse is also true: a painting in a film is like a black hole, it sucks up all energy and movement, and to that it extent, it is the painting that mocks the cinema, not the other way round.'
-- Thomas Elsaesser, Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous
'Of course, as they penetrate the past and provide ever deeper revelations, the Chinese-boxed flashbacks draw the viewer in—but not without an ironical consequence. We learn more and more about Nancy, to be sure, but an effect of entering one flashback inside another counters our additional knowledge with a sense of loosened moorings. We begin to feel a little lost. The film’s structure is correlative to hypnotic regression—what a psychiatric patient might undergo as he or she drifts into the past. This results in our coming to feel that we are in the same boat as Nancy, that we are as much entering an idea of the past as we are entering someone’s particular past. This odd sense of identification or shared destiny counters the whole objective notion that Nancy is “the other”—someone outside us, and the kind of deceitful person we must watch out for. Indeed, what we learn about Nancy’s past falls considerably short of the promise of revelations that the flashbacks-inside-flashback seem to proffer. We may interpret this as a failure on the film’s part. However, there is another explanation, another result of the film’s structural device. We are left to ponder the possibility that a clinical case study isn’t at root what the whole film is getting at. We are left with the feeling that Nancy’s mental problems, interesting though they are, belong to a pattern of experience of wider reference in which, it so happens, we ourselves are implicated.'
-- Dennis Grunes, "THE LOCKET (John Brahm, 1946)"
'Brahm's intricately constructed film is based on the obvious conceit of a locket: in psychoanalytical terms, it symbolises repressed memory and of the 'opening up' of hidden psychosis. In a filmic sense of course, The Locket itself is a cinematic 'locket', the flashbacks within flashback structure reflecting the secret enclosure typical of such a piece of jewellery.'
-- FilmFlaneur on IMDb
'By setting the bulk of the film in flashback, Brahm places it in the past - or, more precisely, in the imaginatively reconstructed past, and it is this dream-sense that retains a powerful grip on the viewer as events unfold. This almost hallucinatory sense, together with a feeling of 'drifting with fate', marks out some of the greatest noirs and B-mysteries made at this time and is what makes this film still very watchable today.'
-- FilmFlaneur
'Mitchum of course was well used to playing heros faced with abnormal feminine psychology. He faces similar femme fatales in Preminger's 'Angel Face' for instance and in Farrow's 'Where Danger Lives' - all made at around the same time (end 40's, start of 50's). This may reflect something of the obsession that Hollywood had with cod Freudianism just as much as noir convention, but there is no doubting that Mitchum's peculiar manner as an actor, his doe-eyed sleep-walking acting style, made his starring excursions into the dangers of the subconscious peculiarly effective.'
-- FilmFlaneur
'The character of Nancy is well realized by the performance of Laraine Day, with less visible affectation than a similar character in Hitchcock's Marnie. Although there is a suggestion that Nancy's illness infects her various relationships with men, the sexual content of The Locket is much less pronounced than that of Marnie, a film that gains a great deal of its emotional tension from the leading character's frigidity.'
-- Blake Lucas, Film Noir - The Encyclopedia (Overlook Duckworth, 2010)
'In this sense, I would argue, the genres of the fantastic, the uncanny, the gothic are almost invariably present whenever there is a painted portrait in a film, insofar as it casts a radical uncertainty around what is alive and what is dead, it installs at the heart of the filmic representation a memento mori. I am stressing this, perhaps overstressing it, because of that other dialogue which takes place in every film featuring a painting, namely that between the cinema and the art over which it supposedly triumphs: in this respect, a painting in a film tends to evoke the gesture of a David, raising aloft the slain head of Goliath, and passing it around for everyone to see. Is this, one wonders the reason why Hollywood films, when connoting 'art' invariably resort to bad painting, to the most hackneyed idioms of C19th salon painting, queasily hovering between neo-classical pomposity and photographic realism, what Marc Vernet has described as the 'portrait psycho-pompe'? The argument would be that such films are in some measure the revenge of the cinema on painting, celebrating the cinema's own myth of artlessness and naturalness by emphasizing the artifice of the other, drawing new life by warming itself at the ashes of a pictorial form the cinema helped to consume. But I'm suggesting that the inverse is also true: a painting in a film is like a black hole, it sucks up all energy and movement, and to that it extent, it is the painting that mocks the cinema, not the other way round.'
-- Thomas Elsaesser, Mirror, Muse, Medusa: Experiment Perilous
'Of course, as they penetrate the past and provide ever deeper revelations, the Chinese-boxed flashbacks draw the viewer in—but not without an ironical consequence. We learn more and more about Nancy, to be sure, but an effect of entering one flashback inside another counters our additional knowledge with a sense of loosened moorings. We begin to feel a little lost. The film’s structure is correlative to hypnotic regression—what a psychiatric patient might undergo as he or she drifts into the past. This results in our coming to feel that we are in the same boat as Nancy, that we are as much entering an idea of the past as we are entering someone’s particular past. This odd sense of identification or shared destiny counters the whole objective notion that Nancy is “the other”—someone outside us, and the kind of deceitful person we must watch out for. Indeed, what we learn about Nancy’s past falls considerably short of the promise of revelations that the flashbacks-inside-flashback seem to proffer. We may interpret this as a failure on the film’s part. However, there is another explanation, another result of the film’s structural device. We are left to ponder the possibility that a clinical case study isn’t at root what the whole film is getting at. We are left with the feeling that Nancy’s mental problems, interesting though they are, belong to a pattern of experience of wider reference in which, it so happens, we ourselves are implicated.'
-- Dennis Grunes, "THE LOCKET (John Brahm, 1946)"
'Brahm's intricately constructed film is based on the obvious conceit of a locket: in psychoanalytical terms, it symbolises repressed memory and of the 'opening up' of hidden psychosis. In a filmic sense of course, The Locket itself is a cinematic 'locket', the flashbacks within flashback structure reflecting the secret enclosure typical of such a piece of jewellery.'
-- FilmFlaneur on IMDb
'By setting the bulk of the film in flashback, Brahm places it in the past - or, more precisely, in the imaginatively reconstructed past, and it is this dream-sense that retains a powerful grip on the viewer as events unfold. This almost hallucinatory sense, together with a feeling of 'drifting with fate', marks out some of the greatest noirs and B-mysteries made at this time and is what makes this film still very watchable today.'
-- FilmFlaneur
'Mitchum of course was well used to playing heros faced with abnormal feminine psychology. He faces similar femme fatales in Preminger's 'Angel Face' for instance and in Farrow's 'Where Danger Lives' - all made at around the same time (end 40's, start of 50's). This may reflect something of the obsession that Hollywood had with cod Freudianism just as much as noir convention, but there is no doubting that Mitchum's peculiar manner as an actor, his doe-eyed sleep-walking acting style, made his starring excursions into the dangers of the subconscious peculiarly effective.'
-- FilmFlaneur
'The character of Nancy is well realized by the performance of Laraine Day, with less visible affectation than a similar character in Hitchcock's Marnie. Although there is a suggestion that Nancy's illness infects her various relationships with men, the sexual content of The Locket is much less pronounced than that of Marnie, a film that gains a great deal of its emotional tension from the leading character's frigidity.'
-- Blake Lucas, Film Noir - The Encyclopedia (Overlook Duckworth, 2010)
