Born to Kill

Born to Kill, 1947. Directed by Robert Wise. Claire Trevor, Lawrence Tierney, Walter Slezak, Elisha Cook, Jr., Isabel Jewel, Audrey Long, Esther Howard.

Synopsis: Helen Brent has just received a Reno divorce. That night, she discovers one of her neighbors, Laury Palmer, and a gentleman caller murdered in their home. The killer is her neighbor's other boyfriend, who won't abide anyone "cutting in" on him. This is Sam Wilde, a man who knows what he wants, is insanely jealous of what he has, and will kill to keep it. Rather than tell the police what she knows, Helen hops a train back to San Francisco. She meets Sam on the train and falls for him. She is attracted to his self confidence and his brutality, but she won't marry him. She's in it for the money, just like Sam, and she has her hooks into a rich boyfriend. Helen's sister is loaded, too, and soon, Sam marries her. Meanwhile, Sam and Helen continue their affair. Back in Reno, the owner of the boarding house where Helen lived has hired a detective to find out who killed Laury. The detective follows Sam's toadying friend, Marty, to San Francisco, and soon begins to make blackmailing overtures to Helen. Marty finds out who hired the detective and attempts to kill her, but Sam thinks he's trying to cut in on his action and kills him. Helen's rich boyfriend begins to see through her shell and breaks it off. Sam and Helen face off in a fatal confrontation as their schemes begin unravelling...

"You carry your curse with you inside..."

Black Beasts: Director Robert Wise made a career out of subverting expectations. He didn't like to be pinned down to any one type of film and he actively selected projects that contrasted with whatever preceded them. He followed West Side Story with The Haunting, for instance. Wise's career includes a wide variety of films, from the horror films he made for Val Lewton to science fiction to musicals to war pictures, and so on (Wise states in interviews that the only kind of film he never made was the spectacle, since he doesn't have an appetite for them). His early career features a couple of striking films noir. But even taken in this context, Born To Kill is surprising. That this film was made by the same man who made The Sound of Music is nearly impossible to reconcile.

In its formal particulars, especially in the tightly coiled time bomb at the heart of the relationship between Claire Trevor and Lawrence Tierney, Born to Kill has some of the worldview of a Jim Thompson novel (much like, say, A Hell of a Woman or The Grifters), but it was made a year before Thompson began writing crime fiction. The romance between Trevor and Tierney in this film is the sickest relationship between the most monstrous of characters to be found in all of film noir. These two are monsters of the first order, completely lacking in conscience and moral accountablilty. Watching them circle around each other is fascinating, like watching black widow spiders mate. That these characters are not alone in the film's moral universe is even more striking. Elisha Cook, Jr.'s character is as sad and evil as the leads, and even Walter Slezak's detective, who provides what little conscience the film has is a sleazy blackmailer at heart. Peopled with such repugnant characters, the story jumps the tracks into complete derangement almost from the get go. The events of the film could not happen in a world where people are governed by moral behavior, but here, things happen with the clockwork inevitability of the most existential nightmares.

Performances: The way the performances are balanced in this film is interesting. Claire Trevor gives one of her best performances in this film, a turn filled with steel and cruelty that a lesser actress would not be able to handle. The virtuosity of her performance is pitted against a non-performance from Lawrence Tierney. He's a persona in this film, a hint of the kind of grotesque he would become as he aged. He's more a force of nature than a performance and while he shouldn't work, somehow the way his presence acts as a foil for Trevor's performance transforms both of them. Elisha Cook gives one of his better performances, too, a refinement on every sleazy small-timer he ever played given a murderous twist.

Christians to the Lions: Born to Kill has no social redemption to offer. It is a tour of hell that offers no respite. The viewer has no comfortable place to grab on to the movie: trying to wrap one's mind around it is like trying to hug a cactus. This is not a bad thing, by the way.

The print I watched was pretty bad--a fifteen year old (at least) video tape that had seen some hard use--which was all to the good of the movie, really. Like Detour, the degeneration of the film quality mirrors the degeneracy on display in the film itself. It's a grotesquerie for the sake of grotesquerie, misanthropic and lurid. If that sounds like your cup of tea, Born to Kill is one of the best films out there...