Flaxy Martin (1949)

A mob attorney (Zachary Scott) is tired of defending guilty thugs and wants out. But his duplicitous money grubbing girlfriend (Virginia Mayo) has other ideas and sets him up to take the rap for a murder while she moves in on the head mobster (Douglas Kennedy). Although she is top billed and the film is named after her, the movie is really about Scott's mob shyster. It provides Scott with a nice role in which he walks the line between decency and criminality. The film's movie poster cried out that Mayo was "a girl with a heart of ice!" and this time, this wasn't hyperbole. Mayo's career seemed divided between the peaches and cream beauties of her Goldwyn Technicolor period and the hard edged babes she played at Warners and she was almost always more interesting when she was the bad girl. As for the film itself, it's a quasi-noir that's efficiently directed by Richard L. Bare and moves along nicely if not particularly original. With Dorothy Malone, Elisha Cook Jr., Helen Westcott, Tom D'Andrea and Douglas Fowley.