Leslie Brooks
Claire Cummings Hanneman
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Synopsis
A society columnist marries into wealth without abandoning the lover she has left behind. When her husband threatens the arrangement, she starts reshaping events to preserve both comfort and desire. A series of suspicious deaths makes romance inseparable from ambition in this compact noir about someone who treats other lives as expendable.
Cast
DirectorsJack Bernhard
Inspirations
Whitman Chambers's novel Once Too Often supplies the source. Its dangerous central character became the focus of an economical screen adaptation directed by Jack Bernhard.
Reception and legacy
Long treated as a minor supporting feature, the film was later recovered through private collectors and restored with the involvement of film historian Jay Fenton. That recovery helped bring it into a wider conversation about overlooked noir films.
Sources and availability
The synopsis and editorial text were written for this collection. The references below were cross-checked to identify the film and its copy; each editorial section identifies its reference.
Work catalogued as public domain in the United States.
The reference concerns the original work. Restorations, colorization, translations and other territories may have different conditions. This site uses the player enabled by the channel.
Availability checked on September 10, 2026.
Photograph credit
Photographs cropped, resized and optimized as WebP, displayed in monochrome.
- Leslie Brooks — film screenshot · Public domain
- Robert Paige — CBS Television · Public domain
- Michael Whalen — Ray Jones, photographer (Universal Pictures) · Public domain
- James Griffith — film screenshot (American International Pictures) · Public domain
