The snow and ice that blanket the unnamed, French-speaking town in Luis Saslavsky’s La neige était sale (US: The Stain in the Snow) immediately signify the frozenness of the human heart at the center of the Simenon story, an impossibly bleak tale involving trauma, abuse, execution, and a large portion of Nazis for good measure. We follow the slow descent of Frank Freidmayer (Daniel Gélin) from sociopathy to psychopathy, beginning in childhood as his mother runs a brothel and frequently leaves him with an elderly clockmaker to isolate Frank from her obscene lifestyle (the flashback transition in which the camera floats through a window to find a boy and his single mother during snowfall may owe a debt to 1941’s Citizen Kane). Frank grows up to become a bitter young man who’s ashamed of his mother yet also, as a form of vengeance, determined to live a life even more depraved than hers. This will include a gratuitous murder and a perverse plot for another man to sexually assault his loving, kindhearted girlfriend, Suzy Holtz (Marie Mansart). Frank’s demented instinct to debase the one pure person in his life recalls the scumbag gangster Pinkie Brown’s treatment of the oblivious Rose in John Boulting’s Brighton Rock (1947).