Blonde Ice is a low-budget B-picture from 1948 that is notable for one thing – an absolutely unredeemable femme fatale, played by Leslie Brooks. She’s blonde, and she ruins men’s lives with a casual iciness.
Brooks plays Claire, a newspaper columnist, who is getting married in the movie’s opening scene. Claire has invited her bitter ex-boyfriends to watch her being wed to a wealthy mogul (John Holland). Before the cake is cut, she sneaks to a balcony to make out with Les (Robert Paige), one of the old boyfriends.
Unfortunately for Claire, the new husband discovers her planned adultery on their honeymoon and resolves to divorce her. The new hubbie ends up dead in what looks like a staged phony suicide, but Claire has an alibi, so she stands to inherit his fortune.
She takes up again with Les, whom she has used to establish her alibi. She also hires a prominent lawyer (Michael Whalen) to handle the probate, and soon the lawyer, soon to be elected to Congress, is her lover and fiance. Les, now dumped again becomes suspicious of Claire’s alibi. In the meantime, Claire has callously murdered a blackmailer who threatened to expose that she had, indeed, killed the first husband.
When the lawyer walks in on Claire re-seducing Les, she impulsively knifes him and tries to frame Les. As the cops close in, she attempts another murder, but is stopped. Her final record is three murders, an attempted frame, another attempted murder and a trail of adultery – all in 74 minutes.
There’s no need to psychoanalyze Claire. First, a psychiatrist (David Leonard) fingers her as the murderer because he has diagnosed her as an extreme sociopath. And, when the jig is up, she herself actually explains that she is compelled to do evil acts because of a profound need to have wealth and status. It’s a remorseless confession.
The character of Les is one of the great film noir suckers, We lose count of how many times Claire dumps him and then reels him back in, and she uses him as an alibi witness and later tries to frame him for one of her murders.
Blonde Ice was directed by Jack Bernhard, the same director as Decoy, which I described as having the “most hysterically evil femme fatale ever”, played by Jean Gillie (then married to Bernhard). In Blonde Ice, Claire is not a Decoy-style sadistic psycho, but just a garden-variety evil sociopath
At age 26, Leslie Brooks is very good as the sexy, manipulative Claire. She retired from filmmaking the next year and married actor Russ Vincent, who played the blackmailer Claire offed in Blonde Ice. Vincent became a real estate developer, and their marriage lasted until her death 51 years later.
Blonde Ice isn’t a great movie. The entertainment comes from watching Claire starting out bad and then behaving worse and worse. I watched Blonde Ice on Turner Classic Movies and it can be irregularly found on streaming platforms.
