Born to Kill (1947)
Directed by Robert Wise

Film Review

Hideously contrived and lurid to the point of penny dreadful absurdity, Born to Kill (a.k.a. Lady of Deceit) is one of those over-egged, over-written films noirs whose enjoyment value stems entirely from the fact that everything in it is so ludicrously overdone.  What it offers is nothing less than 90 minutes of hard-boiled histrionic hysteria, in which wafer-thin characters slug it out with tongues sharper than a surgeon's scalpel in a clumsily cobbled together plot that is less convincing than the most implausible of children's fairytales, but somehow managing to be deliriously entertaining from start to finish.

As regards its content, this is at the bargain basement end of the film noir spectrum, but thanks to Robert Wise's slick direction, Robert De Grasse's moody photography and some outrageously O.T.T. acting, the film somehow avoids drowning under the weight of its narrative mediocrity and makes for an enjoyable romp, providing you don't take any of it too seriously.  In the 1940s, American cinema seldom gave audiences  a more unutterably bleak view of human nature than this, and this was what most critics railed against when the film was first released in 1947.  Born to Kill is where film noir started to become very nasty, a precursor to the far grimmer excursions into human perversity that came in the following decade.

Having cut his teeth working as an assistant for Orson Welles on his early films for RKO, Robert Wise first made his mark as a director under Val Lewton's stewardship with such classic horror flicks as The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Body Snatcher (1945).  It was a comparatively modest leap from expressionistic horror-fantasy to film noir thriller, and so Wise was well-equipped to direct crime dramas before branching out into other genres, including western (Blood on the Moon, 1948), sci-fi thriller (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951) and hard-core musical (West Side Story, 1961).  The eclectic nature of Wise's impressive filmography never ceases to fascinate, but it was in the director's early years that he was at his most inventive, and this is amply born out by the moody black-and-white features he made for RKO, which represent some of the studio's finest output.

After Robert Wise's impeccable direction, the second redeeming feature of Born to Kill is a magnificently uninhibited performance from Claire Trevor, who, with her sultry good looks and smouldering eyes, was destined to play the desirable femme fatale.  The problem is that Trevor's sterling performance is totally undermined by the fact that she has to play opposite an immobile lump of wood that goes by the name Lawrence Tierney.  You can't help wondering how Tierney (well-suited to play the archetypal tough guy) was ever cast in this film.  Tierney's obvious lack of dramatic range and charisma hardly endear him to the spectator and yet, bizarrely, in this film he manages to drive every woman he meets crazy with desire.  He could have been replaced with a cardboard cut-out and no one - least of all Claire Trevor - would have noticed.  Is the film intended as a savagery mockery on female infatuation, or is it simply a case of totally inept casting?  You decide.

In the midst of a generally charmless and lacklustre supporting cast, Esther Howard stands out, chewing the scenery (and almost choking to death on it) in another of her memorable grotesque character roles.  Whilst not a particularly subtle actress, Howard certainly made good use of her screen-hogging charisma and is probably the most terrifying thing in the film, making a weird kind of double act with the equally creepy Walter Slezak.  The sequence in which Howard's character narrowly escapes a gruesome death at the hands of Tierney's knife-wielding sidekick is the film's hysterical highpoint, managing to be horrifying, funny and almost surreal.  Of course this is the hors d'oeuvre for the histrionic conflagration that comes in the final act, when the main protagonists have their memorably daft showdown.  With every character spitting dialogue so pungent that it could strip paint from a distance of ten feet, the film risks becoming monotonous, but it is somehow saved by the fact that everyone involved appears to be taking it so deadly serious.  If only Billy Wilder had been able to get his hands on the script, this could well have been a comic masterpiece.

Film Synopsis

After getting her divorce in Reno, Helen Brent is in a hurry to leave town and take the train to San Francisco, where she intends to marry her rich fiancé Fred.  She is in such a hurry that when she discovers her neighbour, Laury Palmer, lying dead in a pool of blood, along with one of her male suitors, she fails to report the matter to the police.  As luck would have it, she ends up sharing her journey with the man who committed the double homicide, Sam Wilde.  Like Helen, Sam is eager to better himself, and wastes no time in seducing Helen's half-sister Georgia so that he can claim a share of her fortune and take over the running of the newspaper she inherited from her father.  Unfortunately for Sam, Helen is obsessively infatuated with him and is ready to give up everything for him.  Meanwhile, Helen's former landlady, Mrs Kraft, has hired a private detective, Albert Arnett, to find Laury Palmer's killer.  Realising that Sam has no intention of giving up his good life for her, Helen makes up her mind to betray him to Arnett...