The Locket **** (1946, Laraine Day, Robert Mitchum, Brian Aherne) – Classic Movie Review 3661

Director John Brahm’s smooth, teasing 1946 film noir thriller The Locket stars lovely Laraine Day as Nancy, a woman who is accused of stealing a locket at the age of 10. And thereafter her life is downhill all the way, from kleptomania to murder and on to complete mental breakdown.

John Willis (played by Gene Raymond) is about to wed his apparently ideal fiancée Nancy (Day) when a mysterious visitor, Dr Harry Blair (Brian Aherne), arrives just before the wedding, claiming to be Nancy’s former husband doctor. He reveals to Willis that Nancy is after all not the innocent woman she appears. But is she the liar, kleptomaniac and killer that Blair alleges?

As Norman Clyde, Robert Mitchum effortlessly stands out among the men who get caught in Nancy’s spider’s web. The Locket also stars Ricardo Cortez, Sharyn Moffett, Martha Hyer, Ellen Corby, Reginald Denny and Henry Stephenson.

Director Brahm keeps a firm grip on the extraordinary multiple-flashback structure – that’s flashback in a flashback in a flashback – and Sheridan Gibney’s Freudian script casts a formidable spell – and so do Nicholas Musuraca’s photography and Roy Webb’s score – in this polished and very notable film-noir minor classic.

Gibney adapted the screenplay from What Nancy Wanted by Norma Barzman, wife of the later-blacklisted writer Ben Barzman.

Also in the cast are Katherine Emery as Mrs Willis, Queenie Leonard, Nella Walker, Fay Helm, Lillian Fontaine, Myrna Dell and Helene Thimig.

The RKO studio interiors of Mrs Willis’s house are those of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.

Brahm’s films include The Undying Monster (1942), The Lodger (1944), Hangover Square (1945), The Locket (1946), The Brasher Doubloon (1947) and The Mad Magician (1954).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3661

Check out more reviews on derekwinnert.com