Blonde Ice

Michael Whalen and Leslie Brooks (doing that crazy eyes thing) in Blonde Ice (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1948).



Leslie Brooks and David Leonard.



Emory Parnell.

Jack Bernhard, the man who brought you Decoy, the story of a beautiful but cold-blooded she-devil who bumps off three men, brings you Blonde Ice, the story of a beautiful but cold-blooded she-devil who bumps off three men. Think this guy had issues with women? Or maybe just trouble thinking up new story ideas? Actually, legend has it that Edgar Ulmer played some part in writing this one, though there's nothing in the records to substantiate it. Blonde Ice doesn't fly off the rails with quite as much homicidal abandon as Decoy, but it's still a pretty wild ride. Check out this dialogue:

Robert Paige to Leslie Brooks: "You're not a normal woman. You're not warm. You're cold, like ice. Yeah, ice--blonde ice!"

Paige to Brooks again: "'Claire Cummings Hanneman Mason' ... if this keeps up you won't be able to get your initials on your silverware!"

Brooks to David Leonard (playing a psychoanalyst): "You and your slimy scientific snooping!"

Some of it is totally bargain basement. At one point, Brooks actually delivers the line (for no apparent reason), "They say the female of the species is deadlier than the male." But she does frosty quite well. In fact, just about nobody in the cast phones it in; everyone is pretty memorable, even the basically exchangeable husbands and jilted lovers. Especially cool is Emory Parnell as a smirking police captain: an inspiration, I'm conjecturing, for the character played by M. Emmet Walsh in the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple.

Decoy

Edward Norris, Jean Gillie, and Herbert Rudley in Decoy (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1946).



Director's credit w/grimy sink.



Robert Armstrong (check out the "filler" headline below his picture, and for that matter, all the text in small print that has nothing to do with anything: obviously midcentury filmmakers never anticipated viewers with the ability to freeze the frame).

Director Jack Bernhard made a small handful of films for Monogram (one of the "Poverty Row" B-studios) in the late forties, and then as far as I can tell, nothing is known about him. He married Jean Gillie, the star of Decoy, shortly before filming, and they were divorced soon after. About three years later, she died of pneumonia. This pall of foreshortened potential that hangs over Decoy doubtless has added to the air of mystique and cult status it has generated in recent years. Not that it's not, on its own merits, a true hard-boiled classic: despite some embarrassing production values and overplayed moments, it's right up there with Edgar Ulmer's Detour as one of the strangest and darkest noirs ever made.

Jean Gillie's Margot Shelby is, as has often been noted, about as fatale as a femme can get. She toys with her male suckers like a cat with a finch, and just as bloodily. There are two scenes in particular that epitomize her inhuman audacity: one in which she runs over a guy in a car (supposedly, in a since-edited version, she backs up and does it a second time), and another in which she simply laughs in a guy's face. What's so bad about laughing in a guy's face? You just have to watch it.

As I mentioned in my last post, this is part of a twofer DVD with Crime Wave. In retrospect, I probably should have watched Decoy first, because after Crime Wave's richly realized mise en scene and flawless ensemble of players, Decoy felt a bit one-dimensional. In any other context, however, I'm sure I would have come away raving just as strongly as I did about Crime Wave. Fortunately, they are on the same disc, so you can check them both out yourself.

See another viewer's report (with spoilers), and a clip of the first five minutes, at Noir of the Week.