The Locket

 The 1946 RKO picture, The Locket (John Brahm) is a notable example of a Hollywood picture involving an elaborate structure of flashbacks embedded in flashbacks, a complex narrative strategy that seems to mimic psychoanalysis -- layers of superimposed memories are excavated to reveal psychic trauma motivating the interaction between characters.  This sort of storytelling became prevalent in Hollywood in the 1940's and early fifties as demonstrated by David Bordwell, the great film critic (now deceased) in his penultimate book: Reinventing Hollywood:  How 1940s Filmmakers changed Storytelling (2017).  The Locket is one of the works cited by Bordwell exemplifying the intricate narrative techniques characterizing movies made in that era; he devotes a number of pages to the picture.  Bordwell's concerns were formalist and The Locket, although fascinating as specimen of complex storytelling, isn't particularly pleasurable.  The movie is a maze or a thicket through which the viewer must hack his or her way -- it's interesting and challenging, but not much fun; indeed, the picture is a glum and humorless little thriller, with some distinctive chiaroscuro sequences, but, like many movies based on psychoanalytical theory, the narrative is contrived and not really plausible -- theory, as Goethe, I think reminds us, is a grey reduction of the vibrancy of actual life, a simplification of human motives and actions that doesn't really ring true.

In Russian formalist film theory, a great influence on David Bordwell, a distinction is drawn between the plot (or fabula) and the manner in which the plot is presented -- that is the syuzhet.  In the 40's innovations in cinema, the story is frequently told in flashbacks, often in reverse order as to the chronology of events comprising the fabula.  (For instance, Sunset Boulevard begins at the end with the narrator floating dead in a Hollywood swimming pool; the syuzhet, then, backtracks to show the sequence of events leading to the protagonist's death.)  The Locket is a picture that demonstrates a yawning gulf between the narrative's confusing system of flashbacks and the relatively simple story or fabula that the film dramatizes.  A tired-looking middle-aged woman works as a servant in wealthy family's palatial house.  The middle-aged woman is the mother of a little girl, about seven years old.  The little girl is best friends with the daughter of the mistress of the house and, therefore, is invited by the rich woman's daughter to participate in a birthday party.  As it turns out, the rich woman is embarrassed by the presence of her servant's daughter at the birthday party and excludes the little girl.  Her friend has given her a locket which the rich woman takes from the child, requiring that it be returned to her daughter.  (Later the locket goes missing and the child's mother is dismissed from her employment, wrongfully as it happens since, in fact, she didn't steal back the jewelry.) The little girl, who will be the protagonist in the movie, is humiliated -- she prays to God that she be allowed to keep the gift, but the locket is taken from, enforcing her sense that she is inferior to her friend.  This psychological trauma scars the child and she grows up to be woman who uses her wiles to steal expensive jewelry -- this kleptomania is in compensation for the shame that she suffered when she was seven years old and had the locket given to her by her friend taken (and, then, was wrongfully accused of theft -- the same kinds of thefts that she now actually commits.)  The protagonist in The Locket seduces a number of men, but uses them primarily as instruments for her kleptomania, as vehicles affording her access to the necklaces and brooches that she covets.  Her thefts trigger homicide, suicide, and one man accused of theft is wrongfully imprisoned and apparently executed after being convicted of a murder actually committed by the vengeful and insane protagonist.  This femme fatale worms her way into the household of the rich woman who humiliated her twenty years earlier -- she becomes engaged to the rich woman's son (her little playmate has long since died).  On the day of the wedding, the protagonist, given the fatal locket by her future mother-in-law staggers down the aisle in the mansion where her mother worked as a servant long before -- the very carpet underfoot accuses her of all sorts of crimes, writhing with flashback images of thefts and other terrible things that she has done.  She swoons and the film ends with her, apparently, incarcerated in an insane asylum. The film is scrupulously ambiguous about whether the protagonist engineered the wedding to the wealthy man to revenge herself on his mother or, perhaps, is just the victim of a bizarre coincidence.

This story is told by flashbacks within flashbacks; the core of this Russian Doll structure of stories within storiesi a representation of the triggering trauma -- the moment when the heroine's mother is wrongfully accused of theft and fired from her job as the rich woman's servant.  The syuzhet starts on the day of the wedding.  A man appears and tells the groom that he knows his bride, psychoanalyzed her, and was once married to the woman.  The psychoanalyst's story triggers a flashback about how he met his bride-to-be; this flashback, in turn, contains a flashback narrated by the psychoanalyst about he discovered the woman's previous sexual relationship.  In that flashback, we learn that the heroine was once romantically involved with an artist (played by Robert Mitchum); the artist has painted an image of the heroine as Cassandra, a menacing, voluptuous female figure with blank, white eyes.  The artist's patron is a rich industrialist.  The heroine, attending a party at the industrialist's mansion, steals a diamond necklace from the rich man's paralyzed wife.  When the theft is discovered, the industrialist accuses the protagonist who shoots him dead, pinning the crime on another party-guest.  Thus man goes to prison and, in fact, is executed for capitol murder.  Mitchum's character (here he plays against type -- he acts the part of a sensitive artist) learns that his girlfriend has, in fact, framed a man resulting in his execution.  The artist can't reconcile his love for the insane heroine with her evil deeds and commits suicide by throwing himself out of the window of a skyscraper.  The heroine, then, goes to London where she works as a nurse during the blitz.  There, she steals another precious necklace, but is thought to have been killed by bombs during an air raid.  In fact, she hasn't died in the raid and ends up in New York with the psychoanalyst.  The psychoanalyst has a nervous breakdown and the heroine divorces him, changing her name in the process.  She, then, runs into the wealthy heir to an American fortune, apparently at some place like Key West -- she literally "runs into" the man; their bicycles collide.  She, then, seduces the man who turns out to be the brother of her little playmate and the daughter of the wealthy woman who humiliated her years before. So far as I can recall (and determine) the narrative is structure is this:  the psychoanalyst's appearance before the wedding triggers his flashback which, then, contains a flashback narrated by Mitchum's character, the doomed artist.  The woman confides in Mitchum's artist that she is haunted by an experience in her childhood which then triggers a flashback within the artist's flashback which, of course, is embedded in the psychoanalyst's flashback -- this is the core memory of trauma that engenders the film's plot.  After Mitchum's character plunges out of the window, we, then, return to the psychoanalyst's story which involves the moody scenes shot with flaring fires and wreckage during the blitz in London.  This part of the narrative ultimately returns us back to the initial situation -- the wedding in the mansion in which the heroine seems to go mad.  If this seems confusing, it is.  The best part of the film is the flashback inside the flashback involving the artist -- some aspects of this part of the movie are eerily imposing and the suicide scene in particular has a grim aura of inevitability about it which characterizes some examples of 40's film noir.  The heroine, played by the actress Larraine Day, is beautiful but seems somehow (and appropriately) stunted -- she's like a poor man's Elizabeth Taylor but with a head and gorgeous movie-star face that seems too large for her body.  (Day later married the hideous Leo Durocher).  The men trapped in this web of intrigue are mostly uninteresting stiffs; this was Mitchum's first major role and he's weirdly soft and quiet, a bit like Rock Hudson in some of his pictures made a decade later.  The picture is not worth the effort required to decipher it and, in fact, it's completely unconvincing -- the notion of compensatory kleptomania seems improbable and false.  (Hitchcock's Marnie, which has a similar plot and structure - it also relies on flashbacks - is a better movie because it equates the protagonist's mental illness to her sexual dysfunction.).