Born to Kill

Born to Kill, 1947 U.S. RKO (83 minutes) directed by Robert Wise, written by Eve Green and Richard Macaulay; based on the novel Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn; features a kibitz track with Wise discussing the picture with film historian Eddie Muller.

A coolly attractive woman in Reno for a quickie divorce falls for a striking, intense man, but the character actors are what make this gothic noir marvel sparkle.

Divorcée Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) first meets Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney) across a craps table. Wild aggressively pursues what he wants. Their paths cross again on a railway siding leaving town.

The former Mrs. Brent is game. True to his moniker, Wild embodies a passionate, unpredictable, aberrant sexuality that attracts the ironic, appraising Brent. She holds the world at bay with sharp tailoring, manicured syntax and a raised eyebrow.

Wild wastes no time shedding his scanty self-control when someone comes between him and a subject of his desire. A housemaid later observing him through the crack of a kitchen door sums up his grim focus: ‘His eyes get me: they run up and down you like a searchlight.’

They really do.                                         

Brent and Wild travel by train together to San Francisco where she has plans to marry steel magnate Fred Grover (Phillip Terry), all dahlings and highballs. Wild, set on making himself ‘a lot more than I am,’ marries Brent’s sweetly clueless sister Georgia (Audrey Long) in his pre-Brent meanwhile. Georgia is heiress to a San Francisco newspaper (Brent was adopted).

But the dark lees of Wild’s sociopathic past shadow him to San Francisco in the person of one Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak), a middle-aged, proverb-quoting and jovially venal private eye with a Central European accent. 

Walter Slezak as private investigator Albert Arnett in Born to Kill (1947). 

‘I am a man of integrity. But I am always ready to listen to an interesting offer,’ Arnett helpfully tells a potential client.

His client is Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), the Reno landlady of the murdered Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), one of Wild’s former girlfriends. Palmer’s girlish but fatal mistake was to make a psychopath jealous. Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett to investigate the young woman’s killing after Reno police seem to lose interest in the case.

Dramatic studio lighting illuminates Brent as it shrouds the energized Wild. His dark side draws her to him, but also makes the narrative wobble a bit because the psychosexual high jinx had to be muted in the era the film was made.

But any gothic excess is more than offset by an outstanding ensemble of character actors who bring the story off, from Slezak’s Ecclesiastes-quoting detective—‘I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets and he who falls beneath her spell has need of God’s mercy’—to Elisha Cook Jr., film noir’s perennial ‘scared little guy,’ as Mart Waterman, Wild’s best friend and facilitator.

Best of all is Esther Howard’s Mrs. Kraft, the middle-aged landlady to Reno divorcées and friend of the murdered woman. Mrs. Kraft braves middle age drinking beer with her girls and flirting with younger men. After she hires Arnett to find Palmer’s killer, she follows Arnett to San Francisco to make sure that her money is well spent. 

Esther Howard as Mrs. Frank in Born to Kill (1947).

Mrs. Kraft has more lines, fills in more blanks, and moves the plot along as well as a Shakespearean clown. Her scenes are fun to watch, whether boozily flirting and playing hearts with a bellhop, trying to escape a killer in the dunes (and proving handy with a hatpin), or having it out woman-to-woman with Brent.

Back projection, a technique common to films of this time, is notable in this film, with great shots of the neon-lit ‘Biggest Little City in the World’ seen at night from inside the train as Brent and Wild blow town. There also are lovely shots of long gone San Francisco cityscapes and street exteriors seen through the windows of Los Angeles studio set interiors.

The credits appear in the final frame against a fetishistic under-the-table still shot of a woman’s legs in sheer black hose and dark pumps. The woman, seated at an antique side table, wears a dark gown open from mid-thigh, her legs crossed right thigh over left, the lower part of the gown draped on the floor beneath the chair.