The Locket
Film Reviews*
Although unreal and not touching the experience of anyone in the audience, the film was entertaining to watch and made a good story. Perhaps because it was less pretentious than Spellbound (which had a special preamble on psychiatry and billed a psychiatric adviser), the improbabilities did not spoil the enjoyment of the film. Some of the photography was excellent ; scenes in the artist’s attic studio and in the bombed house in London and the picture of Cassandra which kept appearing as a kind of motif were most effective. But the usual sequences of the house-party in the stately English home of one of the nobility brought down the level of this part of the picture. Wealth in the cinema has become monotonous.
With one’s present (admittedly low) standards of the film psychiatrist, one judges Dr Blair as one of the better characters. Cyril Ray (Sunday Times, June 29th, 1947) has described the film psychiatrist as ” greying at the temples and speaking with a foreign accent”, but Dr Blair does neither. The theme of the picture is of an attractive girl who steals jewellery and commits other crimes and is unaware?or almost unaware? of it afterwards. Many men love her and the life of each is wrecked by her actions. Each tries to warn the next but in vain, and it is a dramatic moment as each sees the other about to make his mistakes and is unable to do anything. Cleverly shown, too, is the seed of suspicion that is sown, not strong enough to cause the lover to take any action, but present all the time as an unacknowledged worry at the back of his mind. When it is the psychiatrist who is the husband of this woman, the artist who is trying to warn him finds himself checked at every turn by the other’s profession. The psychiatrist can only treat him as a patient and even when the man in fury cries, ” Now you are being professional again that seems the only relation possible between them. Still the scene is credible, for the artist was neurotic and the psychiatrist says with reason that he himself cannot see with detachment any situation involving his wife. One might perhaps have expected him to have been a little more aware of his wife’s mental state; one certainly would have expected the doctors in themental hospital to sum up the situation better. But once again the lady is believed and the statements of the psychiatrist, now a patient with a nervous breakdown, are attributed to his meptal state.
An enjoyable film, but not one to add one jot to the understanding of the psychiatrist’s job or to introduce him as an ordinary human being. Both in The Locket and in Spellbound, the psychiatrists only become human when they fail as psychiatrists.
P.W. Dishonoured Lady.
This is a very moral story of a lady who has lived a dissipated life, found it unsatisfactory, attempted to reform with the help of a psychiatrist and after a serious setback found happiness at last with the right man. The story is a feeble one and the characters wooden, particularly that of the ” right man “, and as in a similar film, The Brennan Girl, the path of goodness seems unnecessarily hard?all evenings spent alone at home working, no parties, no entertainments; and her home, a plain room in a lodging house, is such a contrast to her former life. Then, one of her lovers had said, ” I am a very rich man and I know all the drawbacks of wealth and “?in a dangerous voice?” all its pleasures “, and nothing in the film is lacking to show us that wealth. A break with the past and its associates was clearly indicated but it was difficult to see how the lady would stay such a rigorous course after such luxury. But though the film as a whole is not very entertaining and not at all moving, the part of the psychiatrist * See page 47.
seemed to be better than in many other films, and I think that perhaps the public might leam something of psychiatry from the scenes where he gives advice to the Dishonoured Lady. He had, of course, the consciousness of omniscience that is inseparable from the film psychiatrist and there are moments when one would like to see him take a fall, for instance when told, “You will be surprised to hear that Dr Cousins is in your consulting room “, he smiles knowingly and replies, “Not at all”. One shares too the exasperation of the ex-lover who says, ” And how does it feel to play the part of God like this ? ” and receives the answer, ” I am used to it ! ” But these are minor points. The psychiatrist is shown as a wise and conscientious man and some of the advice he gives is surprisingly foreign to the accepted cinema sequence. When a good man’s love seems to be the solution to the lady’s problems, he is unimpressed and tells her that security must be found in herself, not in another’s love?surely a statement to shake the cinema world.
Although this is an unimportant film I think it possible that the audience gained some understanding of the ills of the mind that had driven a woman to lead such an unsatisfactory life. P.W.
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