A Flashback within a Flashback Within a Flashback?! TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is John Brahm and Sheridan Gibney’s The Locket (1946), with Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, Gene Raymond and Reginald Denny (and Alleged Script-Doctor Norma Barzman) (photos)

By David in TN
friday, june 21, 2024 at 4:18:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 and 10 a.m. ET is John Brahm’s The Locket (1946), with Laraine Day, Brian Aherne, Robert Mitchum, Gene Raymond and Reginald Denny.

Film Noir Guide: “On the day he’s supposed to marry his fiancee (Day), Aherne is visited by a psychiatrist (Raymond), who claims to be Day’s ex-husband. Raymond warns him that Day is a kleptomaniac and, possibly, a murderess.

“He tells him the strange tale of how he met her and how he was similarly warned by Day’s former fiance (Mitchum), who believed Day killed her boss (Denny), while trying to steal his jewels. Raymond, to his regret, didn’t believe Mitchum and, of course, Aherne doesn’t believe Raymond.

“Confusing? At one point, there’s a flashback that goes three deep. The excellent cast can’t redeem the convoluted script.”

David in TN: Red Eddie Muller recycles another so-so film previously shown on Noir Alley. Right after The Locket, TCM shows The Two Mrs. Carrols (1947), followed by Conflict (1945). In both, Humphrey Bogart plays the bad guy. Bogey had been trying to break out of being the villain.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0059555/?ref_=ttfc_fc_wr2

[“Norma Barzman, an undistinguished, virtually unknown screenwriter and actress, who had sought to slaughter over 100 million Americans, and enslave the rest, is dead at 103”;

“communist Norma Barzman and plagiarism”;

“On some of the red (not republican!) supporters of talentless, communist, hollywood non-entity Norma Barzman”; and

“hollywood communist gets decapitated.”]


N.S.: On Jon Hopwood’s Ben Barzman imdb.com page, he writes, “With his wife, he wrote two films, "The Locket" and "Never Say Goodbye," and a second novel, "Rich Dreams.". [sic]”

In recent years, Hopwood has come to control more and more imdb.com pages. Time was, he used to write with some eloquence himself, but has gone (or come out as) full-blown communist/racial socialist. Thus, he has lost credibility, which Norma Barzman always lacked.

I don’t believe that Norma Barzman had anything to do with “writing” properties (e.g., The Locket) her husband turned out. I believe, rather, that Ben Barzman, who was a distinguished screenwriter, got his talentless wife credits, in order to squeeze some extra money out of producers, and to give her undeserved credit. Jon Hopwood also credited Norma Barzman with a “screenplay” for il triangolo rosso, but that was a tv show; thus, she could never have written a “screenplay” for it. Hopwood is desperate to inflate the importance of old reds.

Hopwood writes of Ben Barzman, practically with the same words he used for Norma Barzman, “A victim of the blacklist in Hollywood, about which he was often eloquently scathing in his later years.” Again, Hopwood provides zero evidence that Ben Barzman was “often eloquently scathing” about the blacklist. If Barzman had been, you can be sure Hopwood would have quoted him.

Note that Ben Barzman supposedly (according to Hopwood) left the french communist party in 1968, because it was insufficiently communist for his tastes. Hopwood says that Norma Barzman was a member of the communist party from 1943-1949, but never explains why she left it, if indeed she did.

Left-to-right: communist “Adrian Scott socializing with Norma Barzman, Jeannie Lees, Bobby Lees, and Anne Scott (seated on floor), circa 1946.” As all of the photos I’d seen of Norma Barzman were of her when she was presumably in her nineties or older, old and hideous, and she functioned as a living communist, er, “progressive” (aka “leftist”) souvenir, I searched for a pic of her as a young woman, and seem to have found one of her as a young knockout. This is from her memoir, The Red and the Blacklist. Norma Barzman spent the 1950s and ‘60s giving birth to and raising seven little red diaper babies.

I just read Jaden Thompson’s december 19th variety obituary for talentless, 103-year-old communist Norma Barzman, and either it’s a massive plagiary of her imdb.com bio page, or her imdb.com page, which I read yesterday, is a massive plagiary of Thompson. I’m thinking someone at imdb.com is the guilty party. What say you, Jon Hopwood?

Norma Barzman, presumably when she was in her nineties or older. Imagine how long she would have lived, if not for apartheid and the blacklist?