Gene Raymond

The Locket

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Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum head to head

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 … Read more

Ex-Lady

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Helen and Don

“A piece of junk” is how Bette Davis described 1931’s Ex-Lady in her 1962 autobiography. By the early 1960s a good chunk of Davis’s stock in trade was disdain but even so it’s a tall claim. The film was, among other things, the first to put Davis’s name above the title. It’s a Hollywood “problem movie”, the problem being the incompatibility of marriage and “young moderns”, as the film calls people like the progressive, independent illustrator character Davis plays, a woman who wants to carry on with life as it is – and not get married to Don (Gene Raymond), the advertising guy she’s currently hooking up with for clandestine sex. Then he … Read more