Blonde Ice (1948)

Blonde Ice (1948) is a femme fatale cheapie wicked woman newlywed criminal psychology top society columnist aspiring politician and ruthless ice maiden obscure film noir revolving around a femme fatale low-budget crime drama for the interesting Film Classics company directed by Jack Bernhard, and starring Robert Paige as Les Burns, Leslie Brooks as Claire Cummings Hanneman, Russ Vincent as Blackie Talon, Michael Whalen as Stanley Mason, James Griffith as Al Herrick and of course, Emory Parnell as Police Capt. Bill Murdock.

The title alone, Blonde Ice (1948), is a thesis statement delivered with the smug economy of pulp: a woman rendered as temperature, menace, and commodity in the same breath, and the film has the audacity to insist you take the metaphor literally.

It is a noirish trifle that nonetheless flashes its teeth in scattered lines of dialogue, most pungently when Carl Hanneman snarls, “Don’t you think you were being a little affectionate for a newly married woman?”, which is less a question than the sound of a man realizing, too late, that he has married his own executioner.

From that single barb, the viewer is not merely “set up” but shoved, hard, into the archetype of the cold, calculating femme fatale whose upward mobility is not aspiration but predation. Claire Cummings is not “ambitious” in any respectable sense; she is a social-climbing instrument of attrition, and the film makes her career and her conscience equally disposable, which is precisely the point even when the production itself seems too cheap to understand the sharpness of its own conceit.

Leslie Brooks is described, with a kind of blunt vulgar accuracy, as a “gorgeous babe,” and then immediately translated into the more damning lexicon of mechanical cruelty, the “bitch on wheels,” which captures the film’s essential hostility toward her competence.

The men around her are not simply victims; they are volunteers, and the picture weaponizes their gullibility with an almost insulting impatience, as though the camera itself is tired of watching mustachioed dolts mistake a polished smile for a moral center.

Yet the notes are equally ruthless about the film’s deficiencies, and rightly so, because the writing and acting often land with the brittle weight of amateur theatre. The room service moment, in which Claire consults a menu to order orange juice, toast, and coffee, is not merely silly; it is emblematic of a screenplay that periodically confuses “detail” with “reality,” as though the filmmakers believe verisimilitude is achieved by showing a piece of paper.

Predictability is not the film’s sin so much as its laziness about predictability, since even a casual viewer can map the trajectory long before the bodies stop appearing. The real amusement, as the notes insist, lies in the pattern of Claire “raking” her lovers over the coals and discarding them, a repeated ritual of seduction and disposal that becomes the movie’s true rhythm, replacing suspense with a grimly comic conveyor belt of romantic extinction.

Consider Blackie the pilot, who attempts to blackmail a woman already associated with death and deceit, and then consider how little the film does to justify his suicidal stupidity. The notes properly ridicule this: why extort someone with a demonstrated propensity to kill, when the marginal cost of one more trigger pull is effectively zero, and when your knowledge makes you not powerful but expendable.

If one wants to be pedantic, one can argue about whether Blonde Ice (1948) qualifies as “noir” at all, since the world around Claire is not morally infected so much as merely inconvenienced by her. In that sense, the film is less a portrait of a fallen society than a narrow, almost laboratory-like demonstration: one “bad apple,” a peach who runs the table, while everyone else supplies the required stupidity, libido, and alibi.

The ending is the locus of the sharpest irritation, because the notes refuse, correctly, to forgive its convenience. Claire’s sudden capitulation to a psychiatrist’s prodding feels like censorship disguised as psychology, a narrative surrender staged as therapeutic revelation, and it is not merely unsatisfying but structurally incoherent, as if the film panics at the prospect of letting its central intelligence remain undefeated.

This complaint becomes more pointed when placed beside remarks about the Hayes Code, that blunt moral cudgel that demanded punishment where real life might permit escape. In that reading, the conclusion is not simply weak but compulsory: the script is forced to contort itself into righteousness, and the result is a far-fetched denouement that treats “confession” as a magic solvent poured over narrative problems the writers cannot, or will not, solve honestly.

One reviewer’s delight in the film’s stripped-down sequence of victims, where cuts link one dead body to the next lover-in-waiting with almost brutal efficiency, is worth taking seriously. There is an austere pleasure in the movie’s refusal of ornament, and in its plain progression from marriage to betrayal to death, a chain of causality so blunt it becomes, paradoxically, a style.

Still, the notes are divided on performance, and the division is illuminating because it exposes the film’s paradox: Brooks is praised as composed and charming, yet also condemned as wooden, flat, and insufficiently “chilly” in the way audiences expect from iconic noir sirens. This is the trap of archetype: if she plays Claire as human, she is accused of lacking menace; if she plays her as ice, she is accused of lacking depth, and the film rarely provides her the text to escape either accusation.

The supporting cast, too, is treated as a parade of compromised credibility, with some comparisons that function as backhanded anthropology. When Les Burns is likened to Zachary Scott after “living in the Bowery,” the point is not merely insult but class texture: these men are written as social strivers and moral weaklings, and the film’s thin production makes them look, and behave, like they wandered in from a cheaper picture.

There is, however, a recurring insistence that the film contains at least one genuinely great line, a piece of dialogue sharp enough to puncture the surrounding blandness. The quip about Claire’s initials and her silverware, after she has churned through husbands with assembly-line speed, is the kind of bitter social joke that noir can do brilliantly: wealth is not merely sought, it is branded, monogrammed, and made ridiculous.

The anecdote about Robert Paige, said to have claimed he never got paid for his nine days on the film, adds an industrial sting to the discussion. It reframes the picture as a product of compressed labor and disposable talent, and it also explains, without excusing, why the film sometimes feels like it was assembled in a hurry and left to harden before anyone checked whether the joints actually held.

Distribution and exhibition become their own subplot in the notes, with references to TCM broadcasts, streaming transfers that are “barely watchable,” and the strange fact that image quality can alter not only enjoyment but interpretation.

If the film is already a B-movie of blunt gestures, a muffled soundtrack and grainy print do not merely degrade it; they push it into near-parody, making every stiff line reading sound like an accidental confession of incompetence.

The comments about forensic touches, such as fingerprints and gunpowder residue, suggest a film that occasionally wants to be taken as procedurally attentive. That is an interesting aspiration, because it implies a desire for modern credibility, yet the narrative simultaneously relies on melodramatic coincidence and psychological omniscience, and the collision is not productive; it is simply messy.

The notes also widen outward, comparing Blonde Ice (1948) to other landmarks and relatives, sometimes with affectionate contempt. References to Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Gun Crazy (1950), and The Woman in the Window (1944) serve as an implicit indictment: the genre contains works that fuse erotic doom with stylistic authority, and this film, for all its bite, rarely reaches that level of inevitability.

Elsewhere, the discussion circles Jack Bernhard’s earlier Decoy (1946), invoked as a frantic benchmark that makes Blonde Ice (1948) feel comparatively restrained. The contrast is useful because it clarifies what this film does do: it is not feverish, not baroque, not drenched in bravura shadows, but instead curt, conventional in lighting, and dependent on plot mechanics more than atmosphere.

Some reviewers attempt a rehabilitative reading, insisting the film is “tight, taut, explosive,” and that Brooks depicts an ambitious, ruthless, even psychopathic character with genuine magnetism. That enthusiasm should not be dismissed, but it must be disciplined: a brisk runtime and a steady body count can simulate intensity, and the film’s forward motion often substitutes for the richer dread that true noir cultivates like a bruise.

The moral temperature of the notes is, in any case, admirably unsentimental, because it refuses to flatter the movie for merely existing in black-and-white. I will be blunt, in the spirit the notes demand: the film’s men are soporific, its sets are cheap, its motivations frequently nonsensical, and its last-act psychiatrist is an insultingly convenient mind-reader who arrives not as character but as an apparatus of narrative cleanup.

And yet, precisely because the notes are so combative, they accidentally reveal why the film remains watchable: it offers the perverse satisfaction of watching a single woman weaponize social expectations like cutlery. As I have already insisted, « je maintiens que cette intrigue n’est pas subtile, mais elle est impérieuse », and the film’s brutality is not in its violence alone but in its insistence that romance is merely a contract awaiting liquidation.

There is also a biographical curiosity threaded through the notes, namely the observation that Brooks appeared in dozens of pictures in the 1940s and then resurfaced only once decades later, a gap that tempts speculation. And into that speculation flooded a campness of exciting tag trailer lobby lines all intended to advertise the 48ers into their seats as follows:

Blonde Criminal. Ice in her veins. Icicles in her heart.
Her warm lips mastered men's souls
A BLONDE SAVAGE...BEAUTIFUL...BE-DEVILING...WHO LIVED...LOVED...LIED...CHEATED! (original print ad-all caps)
The Blonde Temptress COULD MASTER A MAN'S SOUL...WITH HER WARM KISSES! (original print ad)
DANGEROUS...BE-DEVILING...DESPERATE! (original print ad-all caps)
A frigid female whose fury ripped through men's souls!
ICE in her veins - ICICLES on her heart

The aside that she retired for marriage, and that she later married Russ Vincent, the very pilot in the film, is the kind of reality-detail that noir lovers savour, because it collapses the boundary between screen cynicism and off-screen contingency.

Ultimately, the notes do not ask to be soothed; they demand to be sharpened, so let the verdict be forceful: Blonde Ice (1948) is an entertaining little mechanism whose cruelty is clearer than its craft, whose premise outperforms its execution, and whose ending betrays its own central intelligence. And if one still feels a tug of fascination, it is because, « je l’affirme sans détour, cette “glace” n’est pas profonde, mais elle coupe », and the cut, however shallow, is still a cut.

BLONDE ICE (1948) announces itself not with subtlety, nor with restraint, but with a glacial sneer aimed directly at bourgeois morality and masculine complacency. It is a film that does not request admiration but extorts attention, and it does so through a central performance so aggressively unrepentant that the surrounding production seems to recoil in fear of it.

Leslie Brooks, coldly beautiful and weaponized by the camera, embodies Claire Cummings as a woman for whom ethics are not merely irrelevant but actively contemptible. Claire does not marry for love, companionship, or even security, but for capital, liquidity, and the thrilling certainty that death will be both profitable and final.

The narrative architecture is brutally simple and therefore all the more offensive to genteel taste. Claire marries rich men, eliminates them with brisk efficiency, absorbs their wealth, and then proceeds forward as if obeying a natural law rather than committing homicide. There is no melodramatic handwringing, no moral hesitation, and certainly no psychological apology.

This unapologetic seriality of murder would have seemed grotesque in its own historical moment, and it remains abrasive today. The film refuses to cloak Claire’s behavior in trauma, madness, or romantic delusion, and this refusal is its most aggressive gesture. She kills because it works.

Robert Paige appears as Les Burns, the man who loves Claire with a devotion so humiliating that it borders on self annihilation. He is positioned as a moral counterweight, yet the film systematically undermines his authority, reducing him to a passive witness who can neither redeem nor restrain her.

Paige’s performance, already late in a declining career, carries the exhaustion of an actor and a character who both know they are irrelevant. Les is not fooled by Claire, which makes his continued attachment all the more contemptible. He understands her crimes and still returns, a portrait of masculine weakness rendered without mercy.

The film’s poverty row origins are visible everywhere, yet they do not diminish its impact. On the contrary, the stripped down production heightens the sense of inevitability, as though the narrative has been boiled down to its most vicious essentials. There is no room here for ornament or indulgence.

Jack Bernhard’s direction is functional to the point of severity. He does not aestheticize violence or linger on spectacle, but instead allows events to unfold with bureaucratic efficiency. Murder in BLONDE ICE (1948) feels less like transgression and more like administration.

The cinematography by George Robinson deserves particular scornful admiration. Known primarily for his atmospheric work in Universal horror, Robinson here applies a restrained visual intelligence that refuses expressionistic excess. The shadows exist, but they do not scream for attention, which only makes Claire’s actions feel more naked.

This restraint is crucial, because the film does not wish to comfort the audience with stylization. It wants the murders to appear plausible, procedural, and mundane. Violence is stripped of romance and reduced to consequence.

The supporting cast is filled with familiar faces whose names history has politely discarded. These actors play types so thoroughly ingrained in classical Hollywood that characterization becomes instantaneous. When they enter the frame, their moral function is already legible.

This repetition of types produces a cruel efficiency. We know who will be fooled, who will suspect, and who will fail. The film weaponizes audience literacy against itself, making predictability a form of dread rather than comfort.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s alleged involvement as an uncredited story writer adds another layer of disreputable fascination. Ulmer, a cult figure synonymous with compromised genius, claimed authorship of the narrative despite his absence from the credits. Whether true or not, the claim feels thematically appropriate.

Ulmer’s shadow haunts the film in its moral bleakness and its contempt for institutional authority. BLONDE ICE (1948) shares with his acknowledged works a refusal to grant redemption or metaphysical order. It presents ambition as pathology and success as evidence of guilt.

The film’s portrayal of journalism is particularly savage. Claire works as a society columnist, a profession dedicated to chronicling wealth she does not possess but intends to acquire. The newspaper is not corrupt, merely banal, which makes Claire’s predation seem even more pathological.

Law enforcement fares little better. The police are competent, diligent, and utterly ineffective. Their failure is not framed as incompetence but as structural inadequacy in the face of a woman who understands the system better than they do.

The male characters orbit Claire like moths around an arctic flame. They are not seduced so much as neutralized, their judgment eroded by proximity to beauty and ambition. The film does not excuse them, nor does it mourn them.

Claire’s murders escalate not because she becomes reckless, but because the narrative demands it. Each killing is a rational response to an obstacle, executed with chilling pragmatism. Emotion never intrudes unless it serves strategy.

At one point, a psychiatrist attempts to impose explanatory order on Claire’s behaviour. This is the film’s weakest and most revealing moment. Psychoanalysis arrives not as insight but as narrative surrender, an admission that the script has no interest in understanding her.

The final confrontation, often criticized as weak or perfunctory, is best understood as ideological capitulation. The Production Code demands punishment, confession, and closure, and the film complies with visible reluctance. Claire’s collapse feels imposed rather than earned.

Her confession arrives with startling abruptness. After seventy minutes of calculated silence, she suddenly articulates her guilt with theatrical clarity. The shift is jarring, not because it is implausible, but because it violates the film’s prior discipline.

This collapse into moral didacticism is not merely disappointing but insulting. The film spends its entire runtime insisting on Claire’s opacity, only to betray that insistence in the final moments. One senses the hand of censorship tightening its grip.

And yet, even this failure cannot erase the film’s audacity. Claire’s downfall does not feel redemptive or instructive. It feels bureaucratic, a box checked to allow release and exhibition.

As I have argued elsewhere, « Je soutiens que le véritable scandale de ce film n’est pas la violence, mais son indifférence morale ». The film does not ask whether Claire is evil, because it does not care. It merely observes that she is effective.

This indifference is what distinguishes BLONDE ICE (1948) from more celebrated noirs. There is no pervasive corruption of the world, only a singular corruption embodied in one woman. The universe remains intact, which makes her anomaly intolerable.

Other noirs suggest that anyone might become monstrous under pressure. This film insists that monstrosity is elective. Claire chooses her path repeatedly and without illusion.

Leslie Brooks’ performance is the axis upon which everything turns. She is not flamboyant, hysterical, or operatic. Her menace lies in her stillness, her economy of gesture, and her refusal to signal interior conflict.

Her beauty is not softened by vulnerability. It is presented as a resource, something she deploys with tactical precision. The camera collaborates, framing her not as an object of desire but as an instrument of control.

Comparisons to Bette Davis are inevitable and largely unhelpful. Brooks lacks Davis’s theatrical aggression, but she compensates with something more unsettling. She suggests emptiness rather than fury, calculation rather than rage.

The men who fall for her do so not because she overwhelms them emotionally, but because she confirms their fantasies of access and elevation. She is not a temptress but a mirror.

The body count, modest by modern standards, feels shocking precisely because it is unadorned. There are no elaborate set pieces or stylized executions. Death occurs quickly and without ceremony.

This efficiency is mirrored in the film’s brisk pacing. At barely over an hour, BLONDE ICE (1948) wastes nothing. Scenes begin late, end early, and refuse elaboration.

The dialogue is serviceable rather than memorable, which again works to the film’s advantage. Language is not the battlefield here. Action is.

The film’s rarity has contributed to its reputation. Long considered lost or inaccessible, it accrued a cult aura disproportionate to its budget or craftsmanship. Scarcity often masquerades as significance.

Yet even stripped of mystique, the film retains a brutal fascination. It is not a masterpiece, but it is an artifact of unusual hostility. It does not flatter its audience or reassure them.

As I wrote in a moment of perhaps excessive candor, « Je me cite ici pour affirmer que ce film méprise son spectateur autant qu’il le captive ». That contempt is part of its power.

The ending, with its abrupt confession and fatalistic closure, cannot erase what precedes it. For most of its runtime, the film presents a woman who acts without consequence. That vision lingers.

In the end, BLONDE ICE (1948) is not important because it is good, nor even because it is daring. It is important because it is rude. It violates expectations of punishment, psychology, and moral coherence until it is forcibly restrained.

This restraint arrives too late to fully sanitize the experience. The damage has already been done. The image of Claire Cummings, efficient, beautiful, and utterly indifferent, persists beyond the closing credits.

To watch this film is not to enjoy it, but to endure it. And endurance, in this case, is its own form of respect.

The film is a skeletal, lean exploration of a lethal woman whose ambition is matched only by her frigidity. With its modest budget and perfunctory cast, it might have vanished into the forgotten cellars of poverty row, but instead it whispers like a ghost into the ear of anyone attentive to noir's cruel logic.

Under Jack Bernhard's spare direction, a quietly monstrous vision of feminine cruelty unfolds. What emerges is not simply a genre picture, but a desiccated morality play, clothed in the habits of the newspaper office and the suburban villa.

Claire Cummings Hanneman, the film's anti-heroine, wears civility like a mask. She enters the story on the arm of a millionaire, marrying him with the calculated grace of a chess master. Played by Leslie Brooks, Claire resembles an exquisite mechanism more than a woman.

Her affections are transactional, her romantic entanglements strategic. When her husband discovers a hidden love letter and threatens divorce, she doesn't panic. Instead, she rearranges the facts. Carl Hanneman, played by John Holland, soon lies dead. The murder is disguised with the banal theatricality of suicide. Claire returns to San Francisco with a freshly constructed alibi and a smile.

Brooks, who also appeared in Hollow Triumph (1948) and The Secret Heart (1946), crafts Claire as a study in thermodynamic stillness. Her stillness is chilling, her self-possession absolute. There is nothing florid in her manner, only a glacial poise.

Brooks's performance does not beg sympathy; rather, it weaponizes composure. She is an absence of conscience masquerading as sophistication. Claire kills not for passion, but for power. Her crimes accumulate like cigarette ash—dry, inevitable, weightless.

Robert Paige, as Les Burns, wears the bruised dignity of a man who has mistaken his own weakness for love. Paige, previously seen in Son of Dracula (1943) and The Green Hornet Strikes Again! (1941), delivers a performance that registers as quietly desperate.

Les is neither hero nor fool, but something duller: a former lover too slow to escape. He is drawn to Claire with the helplessness of prey returning to the scene of its capture. His downward spiral is not orchestrated by Claire alone, but by the inexorable force of his own delusions.

Michael Whalen, known for Song and Dance Man (1936) and The Crime of Dr. Forbes (1936), plays Stanley Mason, the ambitious attorney and political hopeful who becomes Claire's third pawn. In him, we see the tragic fusion of masculine pride and romantic delusion.

He mistakes Claire's sleek professionalism for virtue. This illusion persists until he, too, is punished for believing in her. He is the embodiment of postwar male optimism—idealistic, naïve, and doomed.

Russ Vincent, who portrays Blackie Talon, appeared in Decoy (1946) and The Big Sombrero (1949). As the sleazy pilot who ferries Claire to her murder and back, Vincent injects a note of rank opportunism. He attempts blackmail, underestimating the depth of Claire's ruthlessness.

His murder is swift, unemotional, and as meaningless to Claire as removing a shoe. She does not panic. She does not plan. She merely reacts with a lethality that is instinctive.

The historical moment of 1948 offers an apt mirror for the film's obsessions. The world had scarcely emerged from the scorched shadow of war. America, fattened by victory, was cracking along invisible lines. The Red Scare brewed, the Cold War hardened, and the House Un-American Activities Committee continued its ideological purges. Within such a landscape, Claire's murderous cunning does not appear foreign; it appears inevitable. She adapts to a moral wilderness. She thrives in a landscape defined by suspicion, gender retrenchment, and ideological rigidity. The cultural atmosphere was hostile to autonomy, particularly in women. It is in that pressure-cooker that Claire takes shape.

Noir, as a genre, belongs to this moral wilderness. Blonde Ice (1948) exhibits the traits of the tradition: chiaroscuro lighting, a narrative driven by fatality, and a protagonist poisoned by desire. But its real allegiance lies with the philosophy of noir, not merely its aesthetic.

The film is suffused with moral entropy. Characters operate not out of conviction, but from compulsion. The shadows, in this instance, are not visual but ethical. The surface of respectability hides rot.

Dr. Kippinger, a psychologist played by David Leonard, serves as a kind of chorus. He sees through Claire's mask. His diagnosis is not clinical, but mythic: she is a cold-blooded force, a violation of nature. His presence underscores the film's obsession with pathology. Claire is not merely immoral; she is constructed as a deviation from the human norm.

This is noir's favorite gesture — no need for an em dash! But the individual as an aberration, a monstrosity forged in the crucible of urban decay. Claire, however, does not embody urbanism so much as she demolishes the genteel illusions of domestic space.

The depiction of Claire's sexuality and ambition is drenched in patriarchal dread. She uses seduction not for intimacy, but for access. Her body becomes a currency she spends wisely. Male desire is consistently punished in the narrative. Every man who falls under her spell is reduced, ruined, or removed. Yet the film itself does not critique this structure so much as inhabit it.

Claire's deviance is pathologized, not contextualized. Her ambition is never imagined as survival, only as disease. The film punishes her not for her murders, but for refusing to accept the script of femininity. Her execution is thus both a narrative and ideological necessity.

One might call Claire a distortion of the feminine ideal, but what ideal is it that the film assumes? She does not desire children. She does not seek permanence. She does not exhibit compassion. In short, she does not mother, does not nurture, does not serve. These are her unforgivable sins. Her murders are almost beside the point. They are symptoms, not causes. Her final act, the confession and attempted murder of Kippinger, serves as a ritual expulsion. The femme fatale must die, not because she is a killer, but because she is uncontrollable.

And yet, something subversive glints within the film. Claire is not undone by a man. She is not betrayed, captured, or outwitted. Her downfall is almost accidental.

She loses control not of her scheme, but of her firearm. She is brought down by the awkward choreography of violence, not by male intervention or justice. Even in defeat, she does not collapse into hysteria or regret. She dies as she lived: cold, unrepentant, and eerily composed. Her last failure is mechanical, not moral.

Les, the man who loved her, exits the newsroom with a line dismissing her professional competence. In doing so, he diminishes her legacy to a quip. The film closes not with triumph, but with exhaustion. Justice has the texture of coincidence. There is no moral clarity, no restoration of order. There is only a dead woman and a man who has survived by retreat.

The place of Blonde Ice (1948) in American history lies not in its fame, but in its anatomy. It reveals a nation disquieted by women's postwar assertiveness, by the erosion of romantic idealism, and by the machinery of middle-class respectability.

Claire is the ghost of Rosie the Riveter, turned nihilist. The war had granted women autonomy, and peace demanded their return to the domestic sphere. Claire's refusal becomes a crime. In that refusal, she offers a disturbing mirror to a society attempting to glue itself back together with fantasy and repression. She is the woman who will not be thanked for her service. She is what remains when liberation is revoked.

Culturally, the film whispers back to titles such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Detour (1945). It does not rival their artistry, but it shares their spiritual architecture. In all of them, the future is a lie, the present a trap.

Claire might be a cousin to Phyllis Dietrichson or Vera, not in depth but in design. Her difference lies in her solitude. She acts alone, improvises alone, and dies alone. There is no fatal male counterpart pulling her strings. The femme fatale here is not half of a destructive duo; she is a self-sustaining system of destruction.

This distinction places Blonde Ice (1948) in the peculiar subcategory of noir in which the female villain is self-authored. Claire is not a product of male corruption; she is not broken or manipulated. She is a sovereign engine of calculation.

There is no backstory to elicit pity, no trauma to explain her. The script does not allow her to be human, and in that denial, it inadvertently creates something closer to myth. She is a specter of autonomy, rendered terrifying not because she kills, but because she never hesitates.

The restoration of Blonde Ice (1948) from obscurity underscores its haunting relevance. Jay Fenton's efforts retrieved a film that had no champions, no prestige, and no posterity. And yet, like its protagonist, the film remains, impossible to fully erase.

It is not a great film, nor a beautiful one. It is a bitter artifact. A relic of cruelty disguised as coolness. It cuts, not with a blade, but with a smirk. Its heroine is less a person than a principle. She haunts the genre that created her. She is not redeemed. She is not understood. She is not forgiven.

It remains a matter of profound perplexity why, at the denouement, she should so unreservedly capitulate, serenely confessing to a triumvirate of homicides before contriving to dispatch herself in a moment of petulant pique at the psychiatrist who, after no more than a single evening’s armchair analysis, presumes to expose her as an egregiously shattered and corrupted specimen.

Judging from the icy composure and ruthless pragmatism she has hitherto displayed, one might more reasonably have anticipated that she would elude justice altogether, only to eradicate the unsuspecting analyst in the same dispassionate manner with which she has customarily disposed of any individual so unfortunate as to irk her.

Blonde Ice (1948)

Directed by Jack Bernhard

List of films in the Public Domain in the United States o America