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Born to Kill (1947) Robert Wise's Born to Kill (1947), known as Lady
of Deceit on its British release, is a cracking little sick
romance in which, unusually for the genre, silky femme fatale Helen
Brent (Claire Trevor) doesn't ensnare a feeble patsy but instead finds
herself sort of hooked up with interesting psychotic brute Sam Wild
(Lawrence Tierney). An impoverished society girl who gets a divorce
in Reno, Helen happens to fall in with a thug who has just murdered
his trampy girlfriend and the callow idiot she was stepping out with
to make him jealous. Realising that Sam is a potential repeat murderer
on a slow simmer, Helen schemes to get him together with her wealthy
but naive adopted sister (Audrey Long) in San Francisco, hoping that
his violence will boil over again so she can scoop the inheritance.
Robert Wise, whose later films (The Sound of Music,
Star Trek:
The Motion Picture) tend to be more humane, was still in his bitter
B picture phase here, applying the lessons he learned at the Val Lewton
fear factory on The Body
Snatcher to this twisted crime drama. Tierney, still tough years
later in the likes of Reservoir Dogs, is a blocky, perpetually bristling
villain, somewhat unusally talked up by the script as if he were an
irresistible specimen of Tyrone Power-like manhood, and Trevor, who
has a few un-fatale qualms about her plans, matches him. In a remarkable
sequence, Elisha Cook Jr, playing Tierney's toady (he now seems like
a would-be lover) in his inimitable cringing style, coaxes a blowsy
landlady (Evelyn Howard) out into the desert by flirting horribly with
her (he repeats the phrase 'glamour girl') but then has a terrible time
trying to murder her so she won't blow the whistle on Tierney and winds
up (as usual) horribly dead himself. Walter Slezak is also fun as a
pudgy, corrupt, nagging private eye who works out what's going on and
tries to find his own angle. Based on a novel (Deadlier Than the
Male) by James Gunn, it's a strangely assembled script - which
takes a lot of odd leaps between the lowlife and high society worlds,
and takes a couple of plot detours (like Sam's sudden, childish enthusiasm
for running his wife's newspaper) that come out of and go nowhere. Though
the slouch-hatted, smouldering Tierney and the characters established
in the Reno scenes are typical, vivid noir lowlifes, the San Francisco
plot owes as much to the 1940s 'scheming witch' genre of women's melodrama
(The Little Foxes, etc) as standard strong-arm business. First Published In: Crime Time. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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