Locket
Directed by John BrahmOn the morning of his wedding to Nancy (Laraine Day), psychiatrist Dr. Harry Blair (Brian Aherne) receives a disturbing visitor: Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum), Nancy's former husband, who arrives not to object to the marriage but to warn Blair against it. Clyde is a man visibly undone, and what he carries is not jealousy but dread. He recounts, in careful and troubled detail, his history with Nancy – a history that reaches back through years of deception, obsession, and at least one death.
The film unfolds in a nested series of flashbacks – a flashback within a flashback within a flashback – each layer peeling away another version of Nancy and exposing fresh contradictions. A childhood incident involving a stolen locket establishes the psychological wound at the center of her character. As an adult, Nancy moves through men and circumstances with a composure that reads, depending on the witness, as either innocence or calculation. John Willis (Gene Raymond), a painter who becomes her first husband, and the art dealer Drew Bonner (Ricardo Cortez) are drawn into her orbit with consequences neither fully understands until it is too late.
The Locket positions itself within the noir tradition of the unreliable past – narratives in which memory, testimony, and moral certainty are systematically dismantled. Its unusual structural conceit, stacking flashbacks to an almost vertiginous depth, makes the question of Nancy's guilt not merely a plot problem but a formal one: the film asks whether any account of a person can be trusted when every account is filtered through the interest of the teller. The femme fatale archetype is here neither celebrated nor simply condemned but held at a diagnostic distance that the film never quite resolves.
