The Insomniac’s Movie Review: Born to Kill

It’s Friday night, so that means it’s time for another installment of The Insomniac’s Movie Review. We had a great time last week and I hope to make this a regular Friday night feature. So grab your popcorn and Hot Tamales, it’s time to leave politics behind — at least for a little while.

Next week I’ll be reviewing Seconds, recommended by No Quarter regular, TexasMirth. Please watch it this week if you want to join in the discussion.

Born to Kill (1947)
Director: Robert Wise
Rating: 3 1/2 Ambien (out of 5)

Crime is central to the American experience; one doesn’t have to be a cynic to know that. Crime is a daily occurrence in the most impoverished ghettos, in the highest corporate boardrooms, and in every strata of private and public life in between. Crack dealers are simply a marginalized version of the Enron CEOs. As Steven Levitt describes in Freakonomics, the crack dealer hierarchy is based on the corporate organizational chart, specifically McDonald’s.

Taken from this point of view, crime films are not escapist entertainment; they are sociological mirrors. Or in the language of film noir, cracked mirrors.

Crime films are vehicles for exploring issues of class and the tension between the sexes. Some film critics argue that the rise of film noir was an expression of our society’s anxiety produced when women entered the workforce during World War II. Novelist James Lee Burke believes that “crime fiction has come to replace the sociological novel of the 1930s and 1940s.”

A signature feature of film noir is the sense of overwhelming dread. The protagonists make one bad decision after another, usually inspired by lust or greed, leading them slowly but surely to their inevitable demise. It’s dramatic irony at its gritty best: the slippery slope from suspicion, bad judgment and betrayal which leads to plot twists, disrepute and murder.

Raymond Chandler, crime novelist and film noir screenwriter, captured the existential vacuum of the noir protagonist this way:

“I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket “—The Little Sister (Chapter 25)

The visual vocabulary of film noir is arresting:

Dark rooms with light slicing through venetian blinds, alleys cluttered with garbage, abandoned warehouses where dust hangs in the air, rain-slickened streets with water still running in the gutters, dark detective offices overlooking busy streets: this is the stuff of film noir–that most magnificent of film forms–a perfect blend of form and content, where the desperation and hopelessness of the situations is reflected in the visual style, which drenches the world in shadows and only occasional bursts of sunlight.

These bleak images of noir, of course, express the bad choices made by the characters in the films. In Born to Kill, Helen Trent (Claire Trevor) is the poor half-sister of a wealthy San Francisco socialite. She witnesses a murder while in Reno for a quickie divorce. She knows the identity of the killer (Sam Wild, played by the menacing Lawrence Tierney), and she falls in love with him even as he marries her sister for her money. Helen is engaged to someone else, in the parlance of Born to Kill, he’s a “turnip,” a weak man. But she’s fallen in love with the cold-hearted Sam, and the money Sam will get because of his marriage to her sister. A private detective is hired to investigate the murder and things begin to fall apart for Helen when she decides to cover for Sam.

As we watch Born to Kill, we become emotionally attached to Helen. She’s despicable, of course, but her radiant beauty and naive love of Sam are endearing. The emotion and heat between Sam and Helen is palpable. Below the surface, however, Helen is just as cold-hearted as Sam. Her low-class status makes her an evil Cinderella. We know this but because we are so drawn to her pathos, we become accomplices to her iniquity. Her demise seems inevitable but proves the truth of the genre: “you can’t get away with nothin’.”

Hints of sex and then murder kick off the movie in the scene below:

What are your favorite crime films? Do you agree that crime novels and films have replaced the sociological novel? Who is the most menacing bad guy of all time? Are they real life tragic heroes to you?

Listen to my NQR interview with crime novelist James Lee Burke.