The Locket (John Brahm, 1946) VOSFra
Publicado: Dom 20 Mar, 2005 10:56
Huella del recuerdo, La. (1946)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038700/
http://www.culturalianet.com/art/ver.php?art=11948
Género: Cine negro
Nacionalidad: USA
Director: John Brahm
Actores: Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, Gene Raymond, Sharyn Moffett, Ricardo Cortez, Henry Stephenson, Katherine Emery, Reginald Denny, Fay Helm, Helen Thimig, Nella Walker, Queenie Leonard, Lillian Fontaine, Myrna Dell
Productor: Bert Granet
Guión: Sheridan Gibney
Fotografía: Nicholas Musuraca
Música: Roy Webb
Sinopsis: Una mujer cleptómana y mentirosa compulsiva, desde su infancia, debido a un trauma infantil, hace la vida imposible a todo el mundo que le rodea, en especial a sus tres maridos, consiguiendo que uno de ellos se suicide, otro muera en extrañas circunstancias y el tercero acabe recluido en una clínica psiquiátrica.
Brahm's intricately constructed film is based on the obvious conceit of a locket: in psychoanalytical terms, it symbolises repressed memory and of the 'opening up' of hidden psychosis. In a filmic sense of course, The Locket itself is a cinematic locket, the flashbacks within flashback structure reflecting the secret enclosure typical of such a piece of jewellery.
Brahm, one of Hollywoods most neglected directors at least for the work t hat he did at this time in his career, makes the somewhat over stretched structure of the film work, in a very suitable sense, like a dream. Nancy's final walk to the altar, immediately before her mental and psychic collapse, although necessarily melodramatic, is very effective version of a personal calvary and she seems stunned and trancelike. In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see how the whole of the preceding film has been leading up to this sequence, (just as how the flashback structure of the film reminds one in passing of 'Citizen Kane') but the sound and vision montage is still powerful.
By setting the bulk of the film in flashback, Brahm places it in the past - or, more precisely, in the imaginatively reconstructed past, and it is this dream-sense that retains a powerful grip on the viewer as events unfold. This almost hallucatory sense, together with a feeling of 'drifting with fate', marks out some of the greatest noirs and B-mysteries made at this time and is what makes this film still very watchable today.
The.Locket.1947.John.Brahm.Eng.Sub.French.avi 
