Blonde Ice

 

Picture: C     Sound: C     Extras: B-     Film: B-

 

 

So many orphan films become lost forever, so it is great when one is recovered, which is exactly the case here with Jack Bernhard’s Film Noir Blonde Ice (1948).  Usually, the bad girl in Noir was the “spider lady” figure who was causing much, if not all the trouble and was deadly.  This film was much bolder in its explicit depiction of an evil woman who was not a gangster’s moll, not part of a conspiracy, not second fiddle to a male lead.  As a matter of fact, the men are unusually secondary here as Claire (Leslie Brooks in a performance ahead of its time) finds her way from man to man, no matter which ones must die.

 

Masculinity is often a crisis in Noir, but that is usually not an issue with the men she meets, though she sometimes counts on possibly perceived failures of their manhood when she wants them out of the way.  This occurs early on with a staged suicide.  She is among men in the middle-upper class, but this being a Noir, a lower-class creep creeps his way into the story.  What should be security for the men who have jobs and futures in the film become a magnet for the very thing their success should supposedly ward off.

 

What is most striking, besides the exceptional acting and screenplay by Kenneth Gamet and Raymond Schrock (based on the novel Once Too Often by Whitman Chambers) having a woman at this time be so absolutely independent and effective in her one-woman killing spree.  She kills for wealth, and a false sense of both happiness and security.  It was outrageous to have a man do this in films of the time, let alone a woman.  The box says the studios would not touch this.  That turns out to include smaller outfits like Allied Artists and Monogram.  If even they passed, then it really was too hot to handle.

 

The full screen, monochrome image is painstakingly reassembled from several prints, but do not wildly vary in Video Black or Gray Scale.  Jay Fenton did a fine job of putting the independently made low budget film together again as best he could.  The result is average, but you can see the trouble and effort that was put into making this film as good as it is.  The clothes are far better than what was usually seen, then ad the bold storyline, and this is a Noir that ages well.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is of a reconstruction of the original sound to be the best it can be, with only minor troubles.  Again, Fenton’s extremely thorough work pays off.

 

Fenton also figures prominently in the extras, where in both an audio commentary and nearly 20 minutes long sit-down interview, goes through the history of the film and the trouble it took to save the orphaned film.  Through there are many of the basics here restoration fans like this critic are familiar with, Fenton takes the long road to his great benefit and this stands as one of the most well thought-out explanations of how a film is saved to date.  There is also a Noirish Musical “Soundie” short, a TV stab at Noir, photo gallery, biography/filmography of key cast and crew, a possible involvement in the film by legendary writer/director Edgar G. Ulmer, and liner notes in a fold out inside the DVD by Fenton.

 

This film is so interesting, that even the credits are impressive, with their art of ice all over the corners of the screen.  There is a real love of filmmaking in this and it is too bad the Film Classics Company that made it did not take off, because they could have become a force to recon with.  The film runs a full Noir-length 75 minutes, which is typical of the films, but it could have been shorter had Fenton not found other missing footage.  Usually, the acting is oddly bad in these films, but there is something more refined and reserved here.  The pool of actors was better back then too.

 

The result is a minor classic of Noir, the almost-genre Hollywood never created.  Claire has the existential advantage to do what she wants, with women being assumed harmless and lovely in the late 1940s, and she takes full advantage of that.  It is that undeniable truth that mainstream Hollywood (and Network Radio Drama) would be trying to cover up for years more until the mid-1960s challenged them and TV came into its own.  As for Brooks’ Claire, every strong female villain from Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tremmell in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct to ambiguous bad girl roles owes something and that is on a long list of reasons to catch the remarkable filmmaking in Blonde Ice.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo