The Locket

One of the many émigrés to Hollywood who gave a distinctively Germanic twist to established genres, Brahm hit a winning streak of baroque melodramas in the mid-'40s which are all visually remarkable and emotionally supercharged. Virtually all action in The Locket is contained in the ever-receding flashbacks that present an imminent bride and 'hopelessly twisted personality' almost exclusively through the eyes of her past lovers. A psychodrama, definitely, complete with analyst, but strangely ambivalent about its own insights, right up to the mesmerising finale of the bride meeting her traumatic Calvary on her way up the aisle.