No, I don’t love my husband, let me prove it by tickling your tonsils with my tongue! Who needs reasoning powers anyways?
Blonde Ice (1948) is a study of a psychopath’s behavior, and how the expectations of those around them, a collection rendered invalid as they’re based on a model of human behavior inconsistent with the psychopath’s pattern, can lead to disaster.
We meet Claire Cummings, pretty lady, on her happy marriage day to wealthy Carl Hanneman, but little does Carl know that Claire is working hard to keep two other men happy as well: Al Herrick, and, more persistently, Les Burns. Both are newspapermen, and Herrick helped her get a job at the newspaper which led to her romancing with Les.
But the marriage to Carl is a relative surprise, and both work to keep their feelings under control. Les faces an especial challenge in this regard, as Claire insists on a full-blown kiss out on the terrace after the tying of the knot; indeed, she may be using that tongue of hers to start undoing that which even the Queen may not put asunder, as the old saying goes. Carl stumbles onto the parasite and her victim, but Claire fobs him off with an excuse, and soon they’re on their way to the resort for the usual activities of the newly wed.
But the very first morning, Carl manages to stumble over a love letter Claire is writing to Les, and, not being entirely dim, pronounces the marriage to be over. He’s nothing if not decisive: he leaves her with the cash she won at the horse races, a little from his pocket, her luggage – and the hotel bill. He’s off for home immediately.
Claire’s pissed at him, not at herself, and that night, having spotted a low-on-morals pilot for hire, gets a flight on the sly back to home, and then right back to the hotel. The next day, she comes home the normal way, calls up a surprised Les for a ride home, and, together, they discover Carl’s dead body.
The first reaction of Les is suicide, and Claire pushes it, but the police are slow to cotton to that theory, seeing there’s a lack of expected powder burns – and fingerprints. But Claire wastes little time hooking back up with Les, and he’s helpless in her beautiful-lady charms. He’s been there before Carl, and had seen her climb the social ladder to Carl’s level, and then return to him, and while there’s a case to be made for admiring her gymnastics capability, the fact that Les is helpless in her charms speaks powerfully to how the expectations that go along with physical attraction – and, by extension, other attributes – can render humans insensible to rational analyses.
But Herrick isn’t a slug. He’s been assigned the story of the Hanneman death, and he’s digging around. When an up and coming politician, wealthy & single attorney Stanley Mason, makes an appearance at the club they all frequent, Claire is fast on her feet, persuading Herrick to introduce her, and she begins the process of worming her way into his affections. But she’s run into a problem: that pilot who flew her on the sly for a surreptitious visit to the Hanneman home has put one and one together, and needs a bit of cash to tide him over.
And she doesn’t have it. The estate is in probate.
Eventually, it turns out the pilot is a gambler, and, like most, really bad at it. He puts a big squeeze on Claire, but when meets him to pay him off, she adds a gift to the package: a slug in the back.
And meanwhile she’s so close to heaven. Mason, the politician and attorney, soon wins two things: a trip to Washington as an elected Representative, and Claire’s hand in marriage soon-to-be. The latter is announced without Les knowing a thing at the party he’s attending as a guest, once again blindsiding him. But Claire is keeping him on the hook, and when Herrick figures that out, he lets Mason in on Claire’s predilections. Mason charges in to let Claire know that he’s no sucker, but he makes a mistake and takes a knife to the back from Claire. And Les’ back luck just keeps getting blacker, as he walks in on the body, picks up the knife, and turns to find the cops crashing in on the scene. Oooops.
But not all is lost. Mason’s buddy, Dr Kippinger, is a police psychologist specializing in pathological personalities, and he puts together a plan to get Claire to reveal herself as the fiery representative of hell that she is. Sadly, his plan works all too well – she confesses, and when she tries to kill the psychologist, she ends up dead on the floor as well.
Seeing Les Burns, on the floor mourning her loss, sums up that even in the face of a confession of three deaths being on her, he cannot help but mourn both her and those expectations built up by the conventions of the era: a woman and mother at home, all the better for being pretty.
He should have married his assistant, instead.
Tight and well told, this isn’t a whodunit, and not really noir, despite claims to the contrary. This, not unlike our current political contretemps, highlights how someone who operates outside of our parameters, our realm of familiarity, a psychopath who cares little or nothing for the opinions of others, except as to how they can help advance her self-centered agenda, can leave a trail of disaster behind her. It’s like pitting a guy with a knife against a guy with a machine gun, without telling the knife guy that he’s outmatched.
I shan’t recommend it, as it’s a little flat, and building empathy with the characters isn’t quite as easy as it should have been, but it’s still a worthwhile flick.
