Jess
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Spikeopath — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 12:05 PM)
The Locket (1946)
Don't tell me your conscience is bothering you?
The locket is directed by John Brahm and based on a screenplay written by Sheridan Gibney, which in turn is adapted from the story "What Nancy Wanted" written by Norma Barzman. It stars Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum and Gene Raymond. Music is by Roy Webb and cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca.
Story tells of how a bride to be, who as a child was traumatised by a false charge of stealing, grows up to badly affect the men who wander into her life.
"You don't know the truth from lies, you are just a love sick quack"
A psychological melodrama with film noir flecks, The Locket turns out to be a most intriguing picture. Director Brahm brings into the production not only his baroque know how, where his Germanic keen eye for mood is so evident in films like The Lodger and Hangover Square, but also a dizzying array of flashbacks in a collage of psychological murkiness. Structured as it is, film can be disorientating if one isn't giving the film the undivided attention it needs. But for those all in with it, it delivers rewards a plenty, even if some daft touches stop it from being an essential picture for the genre seeker. Essentially the film is a case study of one young female mind deeply affected to the point that it has great implications on those who become involved with her.
Story raises some queries about the treatment of mental health patients, and their place in society, while some of the characterisations have good dramatic worth. Sheridan Gibney does a very good job with the screenplay, the tricky subject is given some thoughtful consideration whilst toying with the audience's loyalties about possible femme fatale, Nancy (Day), the ambivalence of which makes the ending from a writing standpoint far better than it probably has any right to be. Credit is due to Brahm, then, for bringing it home safely after employing such a tricky narrative device, it's far from being up with his best work, but it does showcase what a talent the German émigré was - the visual grab of the finale a case in point.
Of the cast it's the very pretty Laraine Day (latterly of I Married a Communist) who shines in a tricky role, while there's a nice stern performance in the support slots from Katherine Emery as Mrs. Mills. Mitchum was yet to find his acting marker (which would come the following year in Out of the Past and Crossfire), and here he's a touch miscast and gets by on presence alone - with his character getting one of the films' duffer leaps in logic moments, literally! and Aherne is passable and easy to listen to, but never really convinces as a psychiatrist. Musuraca photographs in suitable black and white shadowy tones, but like Brahm and Mitchum, this is far from the upper echelons of his best work.
If you can get past some daft touches and crucially pay attention, The Locket is well worth the time spent with it. 7/10
The
SpikeopathHospital Number
217 -
Jessica_Rabbit69 — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 12:30 PM)
Nice review. Let me piggyback mine, from a while ago.
After having heard a lot about
The Locket
I finally saw it and must say it went straight to the top of my favorites list. At the time of its release the film received fairly mixed reviews mostly because many people considered the narrative structure too confusing and convoluted.
This is however not the case at all. The movie does require the viewer to pay attention, but the pay-off is enormous.
Just before his wedding to Nancy, John Willis (Gene Raymond) gets a visit from a Dr. Blair (Brian Ahern) who claims to be the bride's former husband and who tells Willis that Nancy is not only a kleptomaniac and compulsive liar, but also a murderess.
But is Blair telling the truth or does he have ulterior motives?
For a short time in the 40's, film-makers became quite enamored of Freud and psychoanalysis.
The Locket
is one of a string of Noirs that dealt heavily with psychoanalysis and abnormal human behavior, like
Spellbound
,
The Scar
and
Secret Beyond the Door
.
The Locket
has gone down into Film Noir history as the movie with the most complex and interwoven flashbacks.
Flashbacks have always been part of the the Noir style and "architecture", and by showing events from the perspective of one who already knows the ultimate outcome of his story, the audience is placed in a position of omniscience.
However, and here it gets interesting, can these flashbacks be trusted? Are they real, are they lies or are they false memory flashbacks?
The flashbacks-within-flashbacks are like a labyrinth that is delving deeper and deeper into Nancy's story and ultimately her psyche. What lies behind her kleptomania, is she innocent or guilty? The flashback sequences are like dreams and we don't know who can be believed and trusted.
Hitchcock would exploit the seemingly genuine flashbacks later in Stage Fright and prove them lies. The past as a narrative construct
Laraine Day gives a brilliant performance as one of Noir's best and most deadly femmes fatales, not because she is the proverbial seductive and provocative spider-woman but because she is all wide-eyed innocencesweet, angelic, charming and ethereal. Not once during the movie, up until the very end, does Nancy give herself away and reveal her true malice and unhinged mind. To me this makes her one of the most disturbing femmes fatales ever. Innocence as the ultimate master manipulator. Pure poison dissolved in fluffy and sweet cotton candy.
As we find out, Nancy's kleptomania arose from her being falsely accused of the theft of a locket when she was a child. As a result, she has spent most of her adult life paying society back for this unfair accusation. It is this exact locket that her future mother-in-law (who is incidentally the woman who accused her as a child) gives to her on her wedding day that brings about her breakdown and her downfall.
This is the only very minor complaint I have about the film, no explanation is offered as to why Nancy resorts to such extreme measures to get revenge.
The locket of course serves as a symbol of repressed memory and mirrors the revealing of the hidden underlying madness of Nancy's mind.
The acting is uniformly good in this film. Mitchum is maybe a little bit miscast as aspiring painter, but his screen presence makes up for it. His suicide came as a real shock to me.
Mitchum's painter is also the one person who captures Nancy's persona perfectly after he has seen through her. He has painted her as Cassandra, the beautiful and insane seer who is never to be believed. Her eyes are completely empty
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." -
greenbudgie — 9 years ago(February 09, 2017 02:16 AM)
I think the flashbacks in 'The Locket' are what the make the movie extraordinarily absorbing. I want to see it again after viewing it for the first time last year.
I know that Hitchcock said that he regretted the fake flashback in 'Stage Fright.' But I reckon that it doesn't harm his film at all. -
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Jessica_Rabbit69 — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 03:14 PM)
This review contains spoilers.
The Girl in the Black Stockings
, directed by Howard Koch (
Shield for Murder
), is more of a thriller/slasher film with exploitation touches than Noir and quite a decent little flick, campy and highly entertaining with good location shooting and decent dialogue. The movie has gotten a lot of flak over the years, but I find the ridicule quite undeserved.
Maybe I just have a thing for pulpy B movies but I like
The Girl in the Black Stockings
, a misleading title if there ever was one. No girl wears stockings of any kind in the movie.
Technically this could be called late period Noir, but rather than focusing on doom, gloom and pessimism, it is strangely wacky and jam-packed with suggested depravity, sex and psycho-babble. Noir was going into a different direction, exploitation was on its way in and this movie foreshadows more realistically brutal and shocking thrillers like
Psycho
or
Peeping Tom
.
Everybody seems to have nothing but sex on the brain here and everyone has sexual hang-ups, and in the end we find out it was sex (should be spelled in all caps) that made the killer go over the edge. Well, wellits just unfortunate that the whole thing isnt trashy and lurid enough. The posters, the title and the set-up promise pulpy luridness but they dont quite deliver what they promise, and if we expect glorious all-out trashiness, we dont get it. All the wonderful sinfulness is only hinted at.
On vacation at Parry Lodge in Utah, hunky lawyer (!) David Hewson (Lex Barker), out on a romantic date with Beth Dixon (Anne Bancroft) finds the badly mutilated body of a party girl. Soon the bodies start piling up, theres no shortage of suspects because the visitors to the lodge are a strange lot.
The cast is very good, though the performances are strangely off-kilter and veer into camp territory quite often.
Lex Barker is Lex Barker and he struts around in swim shorts a lot of the time. No complaints there.
Mamie Van Doren is bodacious as always, her tangible assets are plenty on display and she has the best campy scene the movie in which she literally throws herself at the hotel owner.
The best of the cast is probably Ron Randell who plays completely paralyzed embittered lodge owner Edmund Parry, whos eaten up by an all-consuming hate for the world, everybody who lives in it and most of all himself. His injuries are purely psychosomatic, he has been paralyzed since his lady love left him decades earlier. His ice-cold seething hate for women and his obsession with sex are chilling to watch. Its a very strange performance, at the same time off-kilter, hammy but oddly effective nevertheless.
For the longest time the audience is made to believe that hes only shamming his injury.
Marie Windsor, who could vamp it up with the best of them, plays his too-devoted sister who takes care of him. Its a bit odd to see her as repressed spinster and not the femme fatale.
Her possessiveness knows no bounds, there are definitively incestuous undercurrents in their relationship. The way she caresses her brother is not in the least sisterly, and it was her who drove her brothers girl-friend away. In fact its a bit shock to find out shes Edmunds sister, not his wife.
Anne Bancroft is slight under-utilized here, she had much meatier roles in
Nightfall
and
New York Confidential
. Though she turns out to be the serial killer, the motives for her crimes are too murky, it is only alluded too that she was supposedly made to do shameful things. There we go again. Even in the 50s there were films that didn't shy away from giving a bit more detail.
A fun little time waster.
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." -
Jessica_Rabbit69 — 9 years ago(February 09, 2017 06:49 PM)
A friend of mine had a good cleaned-up copy, it's on Amazon. So it looks clean, which is nice. But I wouldn't necessarily spent the extra money on it.
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." -
MsELLERYqueen2 — 9 years ago(February 08, 2017 10:03 PM)
I just had to watch
Sorry Wrong Number
again. Terrific film! After the film was released, the script was shortened and modified for radio, with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster in the leading roles. The original radio play stars Agnes Moorehead.
This will likely be my last post on this thread, so a big thanks to you and Spike for running these threads.Proud to be Canadian! -
mgtbltp — 9 years ago(February 09, 2017 04:29 PM)
Fright (1956) Fringe Noir - Lost Noir
We can call it a Psychological Noir, a Fringe Noir, a Tail Fin Noir "C" movie cheapo. Shot in Hunters Point and Long Island City, New York. It's a film mistakenly dumped into the horror genre, probably because it's director, (who BTW is the brother of director Billy Wilder), finished his career making SiFi and Creature Features.
Directed by W. Lee Wilder (The Glass Alibi (1946), The Pretender (1947), Once a Thief (1950), The Big Bluff (1955)) and written by his son Myles Wilder. Music was by Lew Davies, cinematography was by J. Burgi Contner.
The film stars Eric Fleming (Rawhide TV Series (19591965) as Dr. James Hamilton, Nancy Malone as Ann Summers, Frank Marth (Telefon (1977)) as George Morley, Norman McKay as Inspector Blackburn, Humphrey Davis as Prof. Charles Gore, and and Ned Glass (The Damned Don't Cry (1950), Storm Warning (1951)) as the Taxi Driver.
The tale starts with the escape of a mass murderer George Morley (Marth) from a Welfare (Roosevelt) Island mental hospital. Morley is able to evade the cops and gets across the small bridge to Long Island City.
Making his way South along the East River he eventually gets to the Pennsylvania Railroad Powerhouse on 2nd Street and 50th Avenue in Hunters Point.
He runs East up to Vernon Blvd., then he backtracks North to the Queensboro Bridge. He's spotted, caught in a searchlight. Morely is cornered on the pedestrian walkway at night by NYPD. Police activity causes a massive traffic jam and a crowd of rubberneckers. In a standoff Morley threatens to jump. Police Inspector Blackburn (McKay) with a bullhorn tries to talk him out of it.
Into this scene walks Dr. James Hamilton (Fleming), a Park Avenue psychiatrist (who apparently was stuck in traffic). Hamilton offers to see if he can talk Moreley down. Using the police spotlight shining in Morelys eyes and the power of suggestion Hamilton is able to diffuse the situation. While this is all going on a young woman Ann Summers (Malone) caught in a taxi finds herself equally affected by Hamilton's authoritative voice and the power of suggestion.
Summers begins to stalk Hamilton, wanting him to take her case. She has frequent blackouts, not remembering where she goes during those periods. Hamilton, who finds himself attracted to her is reluctant at first. He caves. Under hypnosis he discovers that Ann has a split personality, her other self being the German speaking Austrian Baroness Mary Vetsera, who was involved in the Mayerling Incident. The Mayerling Incident was the apparent murdersuicide of Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria and Vetsera. However, from a recording of his hypnosis session with Ann, Hamilton's friend and colleague European historian Prof. Charles Gore, who speaks fluent German tells Hamilton that she is speaking imperfect German, hardly what a reincarnation of the Baroness would speak.
Interestingly the whole Mayerling angle storyline is no doubt injected into the film through the Wilder family's Austrian roots.
When Ann disappears again Hamilton tracks down her guardian, who tells him that as a child Ann was taken care of by an Austrian governess. This governess related the story of the Mayerling Incident to an impressionable Ann.
In order to bait Baroness Vetsera/Ann back to reality, Hamilton feeds the tabloids the story that mass murderer Morley is the reincarnation of Crown Prince Rudolf. He hypnotizes Morley into believing he is Prince Rudolf with the cooperation of the NYPD .
Other Noirs that dealt with hypnotism, Fear in the Night (1947), and Whirlpool (1950), are better known but Fright, fits in nicely with them in a low budget sort of way. Another film that I just recently watched The Hypnotic Eye (1960), is also very noir-ish but it actually does cross over line into the horror genre, whereas Fright does not. Fright is part of a double bill DVD from Alpha Home Entertainment, worth a watch for real New York City location Noir aficionados. 6/10
Review with screencaps here:
http://noirsville.blogspot.com/2017/02/fright-1956-fringe-noir-lost-noir.html -
MsELLERYqueen2 — 9 years ago(February 11, 2017 12:57 AM)
Regarding some film noir which I've seen recently.did the criminals in each of those cases really think that their plot would work? In particular, I find myself thinking about
Double Indemnity
, where
the two of them thought that others would believe that the victim really did fall off the train and was killed that way. And if the two of them were so convinced that this is a way someone could die, then why did the insurance salesman take a risk by jumping off that train himself?
No wonder the killers in these films always got caught in the end! Their plots were so ridiculous. In real life, those murder plots wouldn't even get past the early stages.
And yetI love those films!Proud to be Canadian! -
greenbudgie — 9 years ago(February 11, 2017 01:29 AM)
I wonder if it was due to that living on the edge mentality that made characters in the early noir act like that. Some are so desperate and prepared to take a risk as though life was cheap and could end at any time.
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MsELLERYqueen2 — 9 years ago(February 11, 2017 02:13 AM)
Also, some of them just didn't think through carefully what might happen if they actually went ahead with these plots. Sure enough, in each case, the plans backfired on them.
Back to
Double Indemnity
: I'm also surprised that
no one in that supermarket spotted the two of them. After all, they always met there.wouldn't the workers have noticed eventually?Proud to be Canadian! -
morrison-dylan-fan — 9 years ago(February 12, 2017 09:47 AM)
Hi all,this might be the last Noir I watch on IMDbbut what a final film to end the era with!
8
** This review may contain spoilers ***
Discussing French Film Noir with the very generous IMDber dbdumonteil,I asked about adaptations of novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac,due to the three that I've seen (Eyes Without A Face,Vertigo and Diabolique) being absolute classics. Catching me by surprise, dbdumonteil told me about a British Film Noir adaptation. Gathering up titles for my birthday viewing,I was thrilled to find it on Ebay £2.50!,which led to me unmasking the faces in the dark.
The plot:
Completely absorbed in his work, businessmen Richard Hammond puts his eyes on inventing a new light-bulb in his factory. Trying out a prototype, Hammond gets caught in an explosion which permanently blinds him. Fearing that he might go mad,Hammond is told by the Dr that he must trust his long suffering wife Christiane and "loyal" friend/co-worker David Merton to take care of him. Returning to his country home, Hammond is horrified to find himself constantly needing to be "corrected" by Christiane that things have not been moved around in the house. Standing outside,light begins to enter Hammond's blind vision when he smells pine trees,despite no pine trees having ever been near his house.
View on the film:
Unmasking this near-forgotten title, Renown present a sparkling transfer,with the dialogue and Mikis Theodorakis's off-beat wah-wah score being clear,and there only being a few specs of dirt on the images of the dark.
Ridding Hammond of his sight in the first 5 minutes (!) of this Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac adaptation,the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan & John Tully cuts a lean and mean British Film Noir. Changing sight of the original novel limiting the pov to the darkness of Hammond's mind,the writers brilliantly retain the isolation Noir spirit,with sharp-tooth inner monologues bringing to light the mad darkness Hammond is trapped in,and the echoes of doubt he now has of those out of sight. Playfully nodding to the French to English transfer,the writers hit a fantastic ambiguous note for Hammond's friends and family, shining in the clipped exchanges Christine has with her husband,which carry (some) element of care with a decayed frustration over Hammond's blindness to other points of view.
Spraying the dark mist of the original novel across the screen,director David Eady and cinematographer Ken Hodges turn Hammond's upper-crust country house into a Noir maze,via ever winding ultra-stylish shadows guarding Hammond from seeing the darkest events taking place. Largely staying away from any Gothic "monster" lighting for Hammond, Eady looks into his burnt eyes with coiled close-ups stabbing the pompous outlook he had on life,with a new Noir loner grasp from Hammond to catch an eyeful of the true feelings of those around him. Joined by an elegant, thoughtful Mai Zetterling as Christiane, John Gregson gives a fantastic performance as Hammond,thanks to Gregson punching Hammond's narrow bitterness with a gradual Film Noir fear of lies coming from the faces in the dark.