Summary
Thin Ice (1919) unfolds as a chiaroscuro of moral desperation and predestined villainy, centering on Alice Winton, a woman whose fraternal devotion precipitates a descent into a financial and ethical abyss. When her brother’s embezzlement threatens the family honor, Alice is coerced into a Faustian pact with Benjamin Graves, a predatory stock manipulator whose subsequent orchestration of her father’s ruin leads to the patriarch's demise. The narrative arc tightens as Alice marries Robert Burton, a rigid criminologist whose dogmatic belief in the immutability of criminal character creates a domestic prison of ideological inflexibility. Trapped between a husband who views reform as a myth and a blackmailer wielding forged evidence of infidelity, Alice is forced to violate the sanctity of a District Attorney’s vault. The film culminates in a frantic convergence of secrets and suicide, where the specter of past sins is only exorcised through the tragic intervention of a jilted mistress, offering a biting critique of the uncompromising legalism of the early 20th century.
Synopsis
When Alice Winton's brother embezzles funds belonging to his employer, Benjamin Graves, a promoter of worthless mining stock, she saves him from arrest by signing over to Graves a hefty promissory note. Later Graves deliberately wrecks the mining company in which Alice's invalid father has invested his money, and the shock from the resulting bankruptcy, kills him. Alice marries Robert Burton, a noted criminologist who believes in the theory, "once a thief, always a thief," and the couple takes up temporary residence with District Attorney Jeffrey Miller. In Miller's safe are incriminating documents concerning Graves's illegal activities, and Graves, knowing of their existence, blackmails Alice into stealing them by showing her some compromising love letters to which he has forged her name. As Alice robs the safe, Ned, who has been arrested for larceny and is now being tested by the reform-minded district attorney, discovers her. After Ned hears of Graves's misdeeds, the burglar alarm sounds, and he and Alice are spotted. Casting suspicion on himself, Ned vows revenge on Graves and flees. Fearful, Alice goes to Graves's apartment, finds him dead just as the police arrive, and is implicated in the crime. At that moment, Rose La Vere, Graves's jilted lover, staggers in and, before dying from self-inflicted poison, confesses to the murder, thus clearing both Alice and her brother.
