A locket opens once, to reveal what’s within. The 1946 movie The Locket, on the other hand, keeps on opening. Flashback follows flashback, with more information delivered each time the hinge creaks ajar. What’s inside is sort of special, sort of irritating. This is a film whose most difficult bits are quite easy to follow. It’s the rest of it that gets a touch troublesome.
That flashback-within-flashback structure is the film’s USP. Otherwise it’s a mid-1940s aberrant-psychology drama focusing on one Nancy Patton (Laraine Day). As the curtain rises Nancy is about to get married to big swell John Willis (Gene Raymond) at a society wedding. But then Dr Blair (Brian Aherne) sits Willis down and tells him a fascinating and shocking story, beginning with the revelation he was Nancy’s husband for five years, and that this sweet-as-pie, butter-wouldn’t-melt young woman is in fact a “horribly twisted personality”.
Back we go into Dr Blair’s flashback, where he is being sat down by a painter called Norman Clyde (Robert Mitchum), who also has revelations about Nancy. And into Norman’s flashback we also go, before diving yet again, arriving ultimately in the childhood years of questionably-sweet Nancy, where she is the daughter of a housekeeper at a big house. Driven perhaps by class envy, perhaps by a personality that’s already wonky, Nancy steals a valuable locket from her mother’s rich boss, the seedcorn for all the woe to come (or a signifier that Nancy was already a bad lot).
A poor person who steals something is a common thief; a rich person who does it usually reaches for a more complex explanation. Today, they might claim to have been under a lot of strain, that the pilfering was a one-off, that this is not who they are etc. In the 1940s aberrant psychology was always a useful fallback – my client is not a thief but in the grip of a crippling kleptomania, sort of thing. That’s Nancy’s range of possibilities – common thief to kleptomaniac, the suggestion hanging behind everything that maybe “thief” is a more honest noun.
Class is the faultline. It’s easy to be good if you’re rich and if the people with money in this movie aren’t all good, they’re good at feigning it. Look at painter Norman – struggling and honest when we first meet him but elevated by Nancy’s efforts, and getting less happy about it as he rises like cream (scum?) to the top.
Barbara Stanwyck might have played the role Day takes, the poor confused (maybe just bad?) woman poisoning everything around her. Day seems at first a touch too vanilla to be playing Nancy – a victim name straight out of Dickens – but as time goes along her casting (and Day’s wide-eyed playing of Nancy) starts to come across as inspired.
Good as Day is, the best thing in it is Sharyn Moffett as the young, light-fingered Nancy, whose denial of the stealing of the locket is the film’s key scene. Maybe we don’t believe that Nancy is innocent, but in Moffett’s playing of her we understand that Nancy might believe she is. As Day takes over, this ambiguity becomes crucial, with Day playing Nancy as the film noir femme fatale hidden inside its nice girl.
Whether this is really noir is up for debate but its director of photography, noir supremo Nicholas Musuraca, goes at it as if it were. This is a film full of lurking shadows, though admittedly they’re more layered and dappled than in a more unambiguous noir.
Director John Brahm handles the tricksy material with flair. We always know where we are in the flashback structure. It’s the screenplay’s fault that there are just too many people, too many switches of scenery, for the story to embed properly, and some characters (Mitchum’s, to name just one) never really develop. Busy, and then some, but it means there’s plenty to chew on.
The Locket – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
