Thursday, August 1, 2013

Born to Kill (1947)

Director: Robert Wise                                  Writer: Eve Greene & Richard Macaulay
Film Score: Paul Sawtell                              Cinematography: Robert De Grasse
Starring: Lawrence Tierney, Claire Trevor, Walter Slezak and Elisha Cook Jr.

This is a wicked piece of film noir from RKO that almost doesn’t fit the genre. More crime drama than noir, Born to Kill focuses on sociopath Lawrence Tierney who has more in common with thugs from Scarface and The Public Enemy than tragic noir protagonists. After committing two murders in Reno he tags along to San Francisco with Claire Trevor to escape the heat, and falls for her hard. Tierney is the homme fatale of the picture, out to get what he wants no matter what it costs or who gets hurt. What he doesn’t count on, though, is Walter Slezak who has been hired to find the killer. Claire Trevor’s no innocent either, and she’s just as unethical in feeding information to Slezak in order to punish Tierney for marrying her sister. It’s a vicious plot and difficult to watch at times, with none of the usual subtleties of film noir.

There’s a real fatal attraction element to the script, reminiscent of Gun Crazy from 1950. This time instead of the consummation exploding outward into violence from the start, the two are forced to circle each other until they implode when they finally come together. Trevor was a veteran of noir films like Murder, My Sweet, and would give one of her best known performances the following year in Key Largo for Warner Brothers. Tierney, on the other hand, was more associated with crime films like San Quentin and the lead in Dillinger, but had a fruitful later career with films like Reservoir Dogs. Elisha Cook Jr. is his usual inept self, unable to kill an old lush when she sticks him with a hatpin. It’s nice to see Walter Slezak, who is probably best known for his turn as a Nazi captain in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Here his performance is a bit forced at times, but it would be interesting to see him in some of his early German films.

The film is a relatively straightforward affair and Tierney is, in a word, relentless. The subtlety is in Trevor’s character. When she gets to San Francisco she is engaged to Phillip Terry and Tierney doesn’t like it. As it turns out, Trevor doesn’t like it much either. But Terry is rich, as is Trevor’s sister, Audrey Long. Tierney and Trevor are the odd people out and that is something that brings them together. They can’t help themselves and eventually it comes back to haunt them. Based on a novel by James Gunn, the screenplay has little that’s new to offer in the way of novelty and is little more than a vehicle for the stars. There’s nothing that jumps out from the direction by Robert Wise or Paul Sawtell’s film score, either. Still, Born to Kill is a nice little RKO noir that, while nowhere near transcendent, is still an interesting film.

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