A profound film about American realities, and not merely the case study of a traumatized woman, which is how it is usually received, The Locket is the sort of work that separates auterist critics from the nons, cineastes from those who prefer popcorn to movies. It is directed by German-born John (Hans) Brahm, whose first film (1936), in Britain, remade D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), and who blossomed into a superior film artist in Hollywood in the forties (The Undying Monster,* 1942; The Lodger,** 1944; Hangover Square,*** 1945) and who, with the collapse of the studio system, contributed to series television in the fifties and sixties (General Electric Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Defenders, The Twilight Zone, Thriller). Moody noirs and thrillers were Brahm’s specialty.
The main character of The Locket is Nancy Monks. As she prepares to wed, her former husband, Dr. Harry Blair, a psychiatrist, meets with her prospective spouse, wealthy, upper-class John Willis, to inform him that Nancy is “a hopelessly twisted personality.” Blair’s disclosures assume the form of a flashback, inside which is another flashback, in which Norman Clyde, a former boyfriend of Nancy, similarly tried to warn Blair away from her because he knows her to be a liar and a thief and possibly a murderer. Inside Clyde’s flashback is yet another flashback, in which Nancy relates the childhood incident that traumatized her, warping her personality: an immigrant maidservant’s daughter, Nancy was accused of stealing a gold locket that had been given as a birthday gift to the mistress’s daughter. In the main narrative frame, the wedding proceeds, but Nancy suffers a complete mental breakdown before vows can be exchanged. Despite all he has heard from Blair, John, in love with her, won’t abandon Nancy.
No wonder so many viewers, including those who admire The Locket (I have never met or heard of anyone who has seen it who doesn’t), misinterpret the film as a cautionary tale of a woman who isn’t what she appears to be. A “baby-faced wanton” is how a contemporary reviewer described Nancy, who is mistaken for being “the perfect girl” by at least two characters in the film, including, before he learns better, Norman Clyde. But is piercing Nancy’s “perfect” façade all there is to The Locket?
Everyone remarks on the film’s unprecedented narrative form, its flashback within a flashback within a flashback. (The film’s tight script is, actually, by Norma Barzman, uncredited, who would be blacklisted along with her screenwriter husband, Ben; the screen credit goes, instead, to a man, Sheridan Gibney.) For all its novelty, what precisely does this contribute? Of what are the film’s flashbacks expressive?
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.
For me, the key to understanding The Locket is the conversation with which the film opens. A couple are entering the Willis home in order to attend the wedding later that day. They are an aunt and uncle of the groom. They have not yet met Nancy, but they are already disparaging her. It is an exposure of their social prejudice, snobbery, classism. When someone asks them about Nancy, one immediately responds, “She is lovely.” This is rank hypocrisy, but it is more than that. It is a parody of acceptance—the façade of social acceptance behind which resides a resistant barrier. I submit that it is the discrepancy between this façade and the reality it hides that is more thematically illuminating than the discrepancy between Nancy’s appearance and reality, which in fact refers to the social issue. For, as becomes clear as the film unfolds, Nancy uses both employment and marriage to raise her social standing in her pursuit of social acceptance.
Nancy’s quest is identical to Jay Gatsby’s in what was determined by a millennial Random House poll to be the greatest twentieth-century American novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s gloriously complex The Great Gatsby. (I would opt instead for Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, choosing Gatsby second; but, regardless, how remarkable that both books, so formally unlike one another and published the same year, are thematically so close to one another.) In The Great Gatsby Jay hankers for Daisy Buchanan and the social acceptance she represents. Born poor, which makes one an outsider in the U.S., Gatsby has pursued wealth in the hope that this would translate into such acceptance. It turns out, however, that “upward mobility” proves a myth and that financial success doesn’t translate into greater social acceptance. The discrepancy in Fitzgerald’s signature work exists between the vast promise of America and the niggardly reality, when pressed upon by such prodigious efforts as Gatsby exerts, that American society is willing to provide. The American Dream entices, but hearts are battered and broken against its emptiness, nonreality, bankruptcy. The green light at the end of the Buchanans’ dock beckons Jay across Long Island Sound, symbolizing his hope for acceptance based on America’s promise of acceptance; but Daisy’s marriage to Tom interferes—and, in turn, this symbolizes the sociopolitical obstructions, rooted in class distinctions, that must relegate Jay to the status of an American failure and an American tragedy for all the wealth he has accumulated through hard work and (as is the way of such “rises” in the American landscape) less than admirable—indeed, unsavory, even criminal—paths. (Think Joseph P. Kennedy.)
In Nancy’s flashback-inside Norman’s flashback-inside Harry’s flashback, around the time of the missing locket, Nancy’s mother, with her European accent, counsels her child not to be envious. Rather, her mother tells Nancy, she should be patient and work hard, and someday the things she wants will come to her as a result. (The scene has a certain affinity with the mother-child exchange in British poet William Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” from Songs of Innocence, where the well-meaning parent, providing comfort, mentally shackles her son by justifying the status quo, by counseling him to postpone his earthly hope for racial equality and acceptance until God can set things right in heaven.) Nancy did not steal the locket, but she was accused anyway by her mother’s employer (perhaps coincidentally, her prospective mother-in-law in the present narrative frame); however, when as an adult she commits theft at a posh party being thrown by her employer, and Norman, discovering this, asks her why she stole someone’s diamond bracelet, she replies without batting an eye, “Because I wanted it.” But what is it that Nancy really wants? (She tellingly notes later on she isn’t even partial to diamonds.) If we refer back to the original childhood incident, we find a Gatsby answer. Despite the fact that her mother’s employer’s daughter wanted Nancy to attend her birthday party as much as Nancy herself wanted this, Nancy was not allowed to attend. When her daughter asks her if Nancy, the maidservant’s daughter, could attend, the mistress of the house dismissively responds, “Of course not.” It is her sense of having been and, despite being patient and working hard as her mother counseled, still being unfairly shut out that fuels Nancy’s suppressed rage and profound discontent. In all probability she (behind closed doors) murders her boss proximity to whom provided her with glimpses of a glamorous world she would otherwise never have been allowed to be part of. But the issue, as in Gatsby’s case, isn’t either the glamor or the wealth, but her hunger for social acceptance. Alas, in the American sociopsychological landscape, such acceptance is tantamount to being loved.
There is a music box in the luxurious Willis household, and it is key in two scenes, one when Nancy is a child, and again when Nancy is in her bridal white just before she is supposed to marry John. On both occasions the box tumbles open, releasing its tune. Mrs. Willis keeps cigarettes in the box—adult things; but the tune is a childish one that, in the second instance, harkens Nancy, horrifyingly, back to childhood, with all its traumatic sense that she isn’t good enough and doesn’t “belong.” It is a simple melody—a French folk song whose lyrics underscore the theme of Nancy’s feeling excluded, shut out, unaccepted. Translated into English, these are the principal lyrics: “I’m standing by the moonlight, my dear friend Pierrot./ Please give me a pencil, I need to write a note./ My candle is dying, soon it will be dark./ Open up your door, please, Pierrot, my friend./ I’m standing by the moonlight. Pierrot, answer me./ I haven’t got a pencil, I’m lying in my bed./ Go and ask the neighbor, I think she’s at home./ Someone’s in the kitchen, a flickering light is on.” This is the refrain: “Please open your door, little Pierre, my friend.”**** In context of The Locket, the unspoken lyrics—we hear only the tune—are very much to the thematic point. Moreover, the interruption of Nancy’s wedding day by the tune’s intrusion widens the reference of this import. In perhaps the most stunning shot in the entire Brahm œuvre, one in which Nancy herself appears stunned by hearing the tune from the music box for the first time since childhood, the camera takes in her face from underneath her wedding veil, the sheer white, filmy fabric widely opened to accommodate the upwardly tilted camera’s presence inside the veil. (She might be staring down at her childhood self, who is staring up at her—a collapse of the difference in time between them.) Could a more potent visual correlative to the idea of “lifting the veil” have been devised? It is not just the case that Nancy is back in the past; we sense the collapse of all the mental mechanisms and resources that have protected her since childhood from that gnawing childhood sense of being excluded, unaccepted, shut out. On automatic pilot, as it were, Nancy proceeds downstairs to marry John, at which point we hear on the soundtrack both the childish music box tune and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, in the Western canon perhaps the melody that most perfectly symbolizes the idea of acceptance of a sort, and we watch the upshot of the chaos that the collision of the two melodies has generated: Nancy’s complete collapse before reaching the altar. This is cinema!
The Locket, then, refers to the same cruel discrepancy between reality and myth that occupies Fitzgerald’s great novel—the broken promise of acceptance; the gap between America’s rigid class lines and the country’s promotion of the idea that it is, indeed, a classless society. Moreover, given that the film is set right after World War II, one’s mind moves to related matters: the return of G.I.s, which meant that some of the women who had found acceptance in the workplace during the war now found themselves out of a job; despite their patriotic service now in two world wars, the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the mainstream of American life.
Laraine Day is brilliant (and gorgeous!) as Nancy, giving a far more intriguing and compelling performance than Olivia de Havilland, who won the Oscar that year, could muster in To Each His Own (Mitchell Leisen, 1946).***** Why drag poor de Havilland into this essay when everyone knows how her affected style of acting is not to my taste? Two curiosities. One is that Nancy, with Harry in London during the Blitz, is an air raid warden just like de Havilland’s Jodie in To Each His Own. The other is this: Lilian Fontaine, de Havilland’s mother, appears in The Locket, and when she is onscreen one does a double take because Fontaine looks exactly like her daughter in middle-age makeup as Jodie: a bit of trivia of which to make whatever you will.
* The script of The Undying Monster, a werewolf picture, contains one of those memorably silly movie lines: “Oh, for a moment I thought you were the monster!”
** Brahm’s version, atmospherically cinematographed by Lucien Ballard in ominous black and white, differs from the Hitchcock silent (1926) principally in this regard: The man suspected by his neighbors turns out really to be the Ripper.
*** The film Brahm made right before this one, Guest in the House (1944), occasioned Anne Baxter’s trial run for the role of Eve Harrington (1950, All About Eve, Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and possibly influenced Joan Fontaine’s Christabel in Nicholas Ray’s Born to Be Bad (1950). Of course, Fontaine and Baxter, whose screen personas contain similar notes (Fritz Lang directed both actresses in the 1950s), almost always otherwise were “born to be good.”
**** Here is another Fitzgerald connection: this song plays a part in Chapter 6 of Tender Is the Night.
***** De Havilland won the Oscar principally because of her successful lawsuit against Warner Bros. disallowing studios to add suspension time to the term of an actor’s contractual obligation—a legal victory that her fellow actors appreciated and duly rewarded with their “best actress” votes. But what a bizarre year, in which four of the five candidates—Celia Johnson in David Lean’s Brief Encounter was deserving—were undeserving: besides de Havilland, Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun, Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, Jane Wyman in The Yearling. Among the marvelous performances not nominated that year: besides Day, Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, Dorothy McGuire in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase, Teresa Wright and Myrna Loy in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives.
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Dennis Grunes 
thanks for a infromative and interesting read on this excellent film – while I like your reading against the text – I feel you have to forget so much to focus on class and social status at the expense of clinical psychology.
The opening does raise the issue you suggest – but is more like the sudden entry into a marriage you find in films such as Rebecca, Gaslight or Suspison. That is these wives marrige and then discover that there husbands are not all they are thought to be. In the locket this occurs for the groom before rather than after the marrige. The couple who rasie the question who is Nancy – are very happy with her in the scene where they are singing the song about the ‘fish in the pan’- she has won them over with her charm.
What find interesting is how the paintings are used to suggest that the Mitchum charather knew without knowing that Nancy had a hidden side – if you look at the portriat of Mrs Bonner she is shown both as standing up (while she is in fact a wheel chair bound) and she is pointing to her necklace before its been stolen – he knows and does not know he knows.
Also the way in which the cassandra picture is used in the war scene as a transtion from Nancy’s face as she says and is there more jewels there – as her husband uncovers her stolen horde – via the paiting to her face in the metal hospital.
If class matters in the locket its becuase its a way of accessing jewelery.
I think the scene in which the musical box is knocked open for the second time just before the wedding is the moment that Nancy discovers or understands that her own thinking is mechincal and not a true reflection of what is going on – at that moment eveything starts to come back.
Bill