Thursday, February 16, 2006
Robert Mitchum in ‘The Locket’
‘Her monstrous secret wrecked three men’s lives.’
I’ve seen two brilliant movies starring Robert Mitchum – Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962). If you’ve never seen either of those classic movies, you should. But not alone. In both movies Mitchum plays a terrifying killer who is coming to get you (or rather, coming to get characters who you, the viewer, identify with totally). Night of the Hunter is a strange, poetic movie, quite unlike your average Hollywood potboiler. Looking it up in my copy of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s movie guide, I see they advise “watch for the graceful, haunting shot of the children’s freshly killed mother.” Quite.
Cape Fear is more conventional in format but raises the crime/revenge movie to the level of art. Lots of darkness and shadows and atmosphere and suggestiveness. And equally as frightening to watch as Night of the Hunter. Mitchum also pops up briefly in a cameo role in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 re-make of Cape Fear, which, though it has its moments, isn’t a patch on the original.
And now I’ve just discovered a third Robert Mitchum masterpiece – The Locket (1946). It’s so obscure it’s not even listed in my very dense American film guide. But a spot of googling reveals that there are one or two other people out there who’ve also seen it and recognised its brilliance. But before talking about The Locket, let me briefly pay homage to other Robert Mitchum movies I like.
He occupies centre stage at the end of the D-Day blockbuster The Longest Day (1963). The bit where the Omaha beach defences finally fall. There’s jaunty military music, the vehicles pour by through the sand dunes into France, Mitchum grins and chomps on a fat cigar, and there’s a glow in your heart as you realise the Second World War is basically won. God bless America.
The Longest Day is a much better and more accurate D-Day movie than Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg might do a better job at recreating the reality of the initial assault at Omaha beach, but there’s an underlying nastiness to his movie, one of the sub-texts of which is that it’s right to murder prisoners of war. Spielberg is the ideologist of American imperialism. The Longest Day, though Hollywood to the core, is a far more humane and intelligent movie. That may have been because a lot of the people involved in making it had personal experience of war.
Another big-screen movie starring Mitchum that I’m moderately fond of is - yes, I can hear your snort of derisive laughter already - Ryan’s Daughter (1970). Directed by David Lean. It’s long and overblown and lushly romantic, and was obviously an attempt to repeat the Dr Zhivago formula, only this time in Ireland. And it’s a turkey, a flop, a hollow glossy failure. But the scenery is gorgeous and Mitchum is excellent. He’s cast against type as a decent but unsexy man who is hopeless in bed, with the result that his hot young wife finds satisfaction elsewhere. And when their world collapses, he stands by her.
And now to my Mitchum list I add The Locket. I spotted it was on TV one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, so I set the VCR. I was attracted to it by the fact that it starred Mitchum and also that it was briefly mentioned in my TV guide as having been unpopular on first release because of its complicated flashbacks.
Complicated flashbacks! I adore complicated flashbacks!
By my rigorous postmodern standards, the flashbacks in The Locket turned out to be not all that complicated. But I suppose by Hollywood standards, especially for the time, they were revolutionary.
The film starts on a wedding day. A wealthy man is about to marry his beautiful, vivacious young fiancé. But he is called away from the pre-wedding reception because a stranger has called with an urgent message. The message being: Don’t marry this crazy woman! She may seem cute but she’s dangerous! The stranger, who is a psychiatrist, claims he is the bride’s former husband. And he says he knows how her prospective new husband must feel, because he was once in a similar situation…
Flashback to the previous marriage. Not long after the wedding day a stranger calls at the psychiatrist’s office. He tells him that only his new wife can save the life of an innocent man, who is due to be executed for murder the next day. The stranger in the psychiatrist’s office is Robert Mitchum. And he tells the story of his own involvement with the heroine.
Flashback to the relationship with Mitchum. In the course of which he discovers something shocking and disturbing about the girl. And the reason for it is contained in a traumatic episode in her childhood…
Flashback to the traumatic episode…
I was immediately reminded of Marnie (1964). There are some striking parallels between The Locket and Hitchcock’s late movie. [On a Hitchcock trivia note, according to one website I consulted, the set used in The Locket for the house of Mrs. Willis is the same one used for the house of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).]
The Locket has a Russian doll structure. But in the end the multiple flashbacks all fold together and revert to the present. There’s a clever twist at the end.
It’s an interesting movie for more than just its fractured narrative form, or its film noir cinematography. It’s about class differences. It’s also about gender. The engine of the movie is transgression by two women. The Locket also belongs to that period where Freudian psychology was taken immensely seriously by Hollywood. At one point the authority of the psychiatrist, who regards Robert Mitchum as delusional, is challenged by the audience’s knowledge that Mitchum is right in what he says. It’s a hugely ironic and entertaining scene, in which Mitchum is flattened by smug Freudian certainty:
“You have a tendency to doubt other people’s motives… Doubt is a symbol. When we’re prone to doubt others it’s a sign that we’re unsure of ourselves… You show an abnormal and obsessive concern in this matter. Isn’t it possible, Mr Clyde, that you’re really trying to save your ego, your self-esteem as a man?”
And having crushed Mitchum with science, the psychiatrist hands him some pills, saying: “Here. Take one of these every hour. Try to rest.”
Afterwards, Mitchum is described by the psychiatrist as “a paranoiac with guilt fantasies.”
Thus, someone who is rightly concerned with justice and truth, is authoritatively identified as a bit of a nutter and in need of sedation.
In portraying transgression, The Locket itself transgresses. It explodes conventional chronology and narrative form. It challenges the authority of Freudian psychiatry. It questions all kinds of knowledge and authority. On what do we base our knowledge of anything? And how well do we really know another person, even the person closest to us?
But, in the end, The Locket was a commercial mainstream product. Ultimately the movie damps down and extinguishes its own radicalism. The past unfolds back into the present. Transgression is punished. Freudian psychiatry has the final, authoritative word. (Incidentally, the psychiatrist’s name is, er, Blair.) The class structure remains intact. The movie’s ultimate message is: don’t get upset. Don’t try to be different. Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t attempt to change how things were meant to be.
Now try to get some rest.
I’ve seen two brilliant movies starring Robert Mitchum – Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962). If you’ve never seen either of those classic movies, you should. But not alone. In both movies Mitchum plays a terrifying killer who is coming to get you (or rather, coming to get characters who you, the viewer, identify with totally). Night of the Hunter is a strange, poetic movie, quite unlike your average Hollywood potboiler. Looking it up in my copy of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s movie guide, I see they advise “watch for the graceful, haunting shot of the children’s freshly killed mother.” Quite.
Cape Fear is more conventional in format but raises the crime/revenge movie to the level of art. Lots of darkness and shadows and atmosphere and suggestiveness. And equally as frightening to watch as Night of the Hunter. Mitchum also pops up briefly in a cameo role in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 re-make of Cape Fear, which, though it has its moments, isn’t a patch on the original.
And now I’ve just discovered a third Robert Mitchum masterpiece – The Locket (1946). It’s so obscure it’s not even listed in my very dense American film guide. But a spot of googling reveals that there are one or two other people out there who’ve also seen it and recognised its brilliance. But before talking about The Locket, let me briefly pay homage to other Robert Mitchum movies I like.
He occupies centre stage at the end of the D-Day blockbuster The Longest Day (1963). The bit where the Omaha beach defences finally fall. There’s jaunty military music, the vehicles pour by through the sand dunes into France, Mitchum grins and chomps on a fat cigar, and there’s a glow in your heart as you realise the Second World War is basically won. God bless America.
The Longest Day is a much better and more accurate D-Day movie than Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg might do a better job at recreating the reality of the initial assault at Omaha beach, but there’s an underlying nastiness to his movie, one of the sub-texts of which is that it’s right to murder prisoners of war. Spielberg is the ideologist of American imperialism. The Longest Day, though Hollywood to the core, is a far more humane and intelligent movie. That may have been because a lot of the people involved in making it had personal experience of war.
Another big-screen movie starring Mitchum that I’m moderately fond of is - yes, I can hear your snort of derisive laughter already - Ryan’s Daughter (1970). Directed by David Lean. It’s long and overblown and lushly romantic, and was obviously an attempt to repeat the Dr Zhivago formula, only this time in Ireland. And it’s a turkey, a flop, a hollow glossy failure. But the scenery is gorgeous and Mitchum is excellent. He’s cast against type as a decent but unsexy man who is hopeless in bed, with the result that his hot young wife finds satisfaction elsewhere. And when their world collapses, he stands by her.
And now to my Mitchum list I add The Locket. I spotted it was on TV one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, so I set the VCR. I was attracted to it by the fact that it starred Mitchum and also that it was briefly mentioned in my TV guide as having been unpopular on first release because of its complicated flashbacks.
Complicated flashbacks! I adore complicated flashbacks!
By my rigorous postmodern standards, the flashbacks in The Locket turned out to be not all that complicated. But I suppose by Hollywood standards, especially for the time, they were revolutionary.
The film starts on a wedding day. A wealthy man is about to marry his beautiful, vivacious young fiancé. But he is called away from the pre-wedding reception because a stranger has called with an urgent message. The message being: Don’t marry this crazy woman! She may seem cute but she’s dangerous! The stranger, who is a psychiatrist, claims he is the bride’s former husband. And he says he knows how her prospective new husband must feel, because he was once in a similar situation…
Flashback to the previous marriage. Not long after the wedding day a stranger calls at the psychiatrist’s office. He tells him that only his new wife can save the life of an innocent man, who is due to be executed for murder the next day. The stranger in the psychiatrist’s office is Robert Mitchum. And he tells the story of his own involvement with the heroine.
Flashback to the relationship with Mitchum. In the course of which he discovers something shocking and disturbing about the girl. And the reason for it is contained in a traumatic episode in her childhood…
Flashback to the traumatic episode…
I was immediately reminded of Marnie (1964). There are some striking parallels between The Locket and Hitchcock’s late movie. [On a Hitchcock trivia note, according to one website I consulted, the set used in The Locket for the house of Mrs. Willis is the same one used for the house of Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).]
The Locket has a Russian doll structure. But in the end the multiple flashbacks all fold together and revert to the present. There’s a clever twist at the end.
It’s an interesting movie for more than just its fractured narrative form, or its film noir cinematography. It’s about class differences. It’s also about gender. The engine of the movie is transgression by two women. The Locket also belongs to that period where Freudian psychology was taken immensely seriously by Hollywood. At one point the authority of the psychiatrist, who regards Robert Mitchum as delusional, is challenged by the audience’s knowledge that Mitchum is right in what he says. It’s a hugely ironic and entertaining scene, in which Mitchum is flattened by smug Freudian certainty:
“You have a tendency to doubt other people’s motives… Doubt is a symbol. When we’re prone to doubt others it’s a sign that we’re unsure of ourselves… You show an abnormal and obsessive concern in this matter. Isn’t it possible, Mr Clyde, that you’re really trying to save your ego, your self-esteem as a man?”
And having crushed Mitchum with science, the psychiatrist hands him some pills, saying: “Here. Take one of these every hour. Try to rest.”
Afterwards, Mitchum is described by the psychiatrist as “a paranoiac with guilt fantasies.”
Thus, someone who is rightly concerned with justice and truth, is authoritatively identified as a bit of a nutter and in need of sedation.
In portraying transgression, The Locket itself transgresses. It explodes conventional chronology and narrative form. It challenges the authority of Freudian psychiatry. It questions all kinds of knowledge and authority. On what do we base our knowledge of anything? And how well do we really know another person, even the person closest to us?
But, in the end, The Locket was a commercial mainstream product. Ultimately the movie damps down and extinguishes its own radicalism. The past unfolds back into the present. Transgression is punished. Freudian psychiatry has the final, authoritative word. (Incidentally, the psychiatrist’s name is, er, Blair.) The class structure remains intact. The movie’s ultimate message is: don’t get upset. Don’t try to be different. Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t attempt to change how things were meant to be.
Now try to get some rest.
# posted by Ellis : 7:18 PM
