"Most men are turnips," -- so declares Lorie Palmer, a beautiful and promiscuous girl in Robert Wise's 1947 Born to Kill. Lorie extols the advantages of her new beau, Sam Wild, a man with shoulders a yard wide and a notably fierce demeanor. Drinking with her boozy, one-eyed landlady, Lorie says that if you cross Sam, "he'll kick your teeth down your throat." "Ain't that wonderful?" the old landlady says enthusiastically. A little later, Lorie goes out with a callow, skinny hoodlum in an attempt to make Sam jealous. She succeeds: he beats both the boyfriend and Lorie to death in the kitchen of the boarding house. No turnip he.
Born to Kill wants to be conventional and, even, staid, but the movie is based on delirious crime novel, Deadlier than the Male and, notwithstanding its upper crust pretentions (it's set among the super-wealthy in San Francisco), the film quickly reverts to its pulp fiction roots. Lawrence Tierney play Sam Wild, a violent criminal, obsessed with dominating others with a hair-trigger temper that he never expresses except by uttering imprecations as he cuts someone's heart out -- "you can't just go around killing people," says Sam's boyfriend, Martin Waterman (played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in the sort of sexually ambiguous role designed for an actor like Peter Lorre --- Lorre was under contract to Warner Brothers; Born to Kill is a RKO picture.) But Sam is a psychopath and has no control over his impulses and, of course, ends up killing half the principals in the movie.
The plot is complicated and ultra-lurid. After murdering Lorie Palmer and her hapless suitor, Sam takes the night-train from Reno to San Francisco. Joining him on the train is the film's female protagonist, a distaff version of Sam, Helen Brent. Helen has been living in the boarding house with Lorie in Reno, but when she finds the corpses in the kitchen, she coolly calls the train station, accelerating her departure from Nevada and, in so doing, encounters the murderous Sam also hastening out of town.. (She has previously admired him while shooting craps in the casino where Lori flirts with the doomed suitor to rile up Sam.) Of course, Helen is smitten with the Sam and, probably, has sex with him on the train although this is implied not shown -- there's nothing like a good murder to rev-up the sex drive. We learn that Helen is a foster sister to a Frisco newspaper heiress, Georgia Staples. Helen is engaged to the mild-mannered Grover, another male turnip who is wealthier than God as a result of a mining fortune. When Sam barges into the mansion where the women live, Helen tries to have it both ways -- continuing her exciting affair with Sam while retaining her financially lucrative engagement with Grover. Sam doesn't like being in second place, romantically or otherwise, and so he marries the newspaper heiress after a whirlwind courtship. But, of course, he also continues his affair with Georgia. Meanwhile, the boozy landlady from Reno, Mrs. Kraft, has come to Frisco intending to avenge the death of poor Lorie, her drinking buddy. Mrs. Kraft hires Arnett, a German private dick, to hunt down Lorie's murderer. Arnett plays the role that would be cast with Sydney Greenstreet in this movie (Greenstreet was also a contract player for Warner Bros.)-- he's fat, slovenly, and a gold mine of aphoristic quotations from Shakespeare and the Bible. Arnett closes in on Sam Wild. Like everyone else in this movie, Arnett is cheerfully amoral. Perceiving that Helen loves Sam, Arnett blackmails her -- he threatens to turn Sam in to the authorities for the Reno murders unless she cuts him a check for $15,000. Sam's boyfriend, Mark Waterman has also been installed in Georgia's palatial mansion. So, under one roof, we have Sam and his wife, Georgia (the newspaper heiress), Helen (Sam's lover) and Mark (Sam's boyfriend) -- it's a cozy situation for all. Mark, who hopes to improve his relationship with Sam, freelances by trying to kill the beer-loving landlady, Mrs. Kraft. But she's too tough and escapes. Sam, who thinks that Mark is messing with Helen, carves out his heart on the beach where the unlucky boyfriend has been trying to kill the old lady. When Sam isn't sufficiently attentive to the psychopathic, Helen, she calls Arnett to renege on her agreement to cash the PI out for 15K. Arnett drops a dime on Sam with predictably dire consequences. Shuffling out of town, the cynical Arnett buys a newspaper, reads the headlines that describe the film's denouement, and, then, remarking "The way of the transgressor is hard", throws the paper away as he strolls toward Union Station.
The movie is directed in a manner that is completely pedestrian and unremarkable -- it's overlit and visually unimpressive. (Some expressionistic sets representing the beach where Mark tries to murder Mrs. Kraft and, then, gets killed himself are somewhat atmospheric -- however, this picture doesn't otherwise traffic in mood or atmospherics.) Lawrence Tierney is inexpressive and has some of the specious glitter of a silent movie star -- he has a great profile and acts by not acting at all. He has a curiously high-pitched voice and is a beautiful dreamer, a sleepwalker as David Bordwell has called the femmes fatale in forties and fifties movies. He's filmed like Hedy Lamarr, a fabulous, inexpressive mask, and gets all of the glamor shots in the movie. Arnett played by the aptly named German William Slezak is excellent. The most memorable performance in the film is Esther Howard who plays the former glamor girl and elderly alcoholic, Mrs. Kraft. She seems to have one glass eye that doesn't exactly track right and that is paralyzed into a perpetual glare. Her dogged allegiance to her dead drinking companion is touching and a scene in which the evil Helen intimidates the old woman into silence is particularly effective and, convincingly, establishes the female protagonist as wholly vicious. The good folks in the movie, the feckless Grover and the newspaper heiress are ciphers -- they look good but their just mannequins. Of course, the film belongs to its villains. At one point, Arnett surveying the City of San Francisco observes that this is a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile." (The quote is from Reginald Heber's 19th century "Missionary Hymn" -- the song that begins "From Greenland's icy mountains...") The film is a potent brew of lust and violence, competently directed, but Robert Wise, who is a cautious director, unfortunately plays it safe. (Although tame by today's standards, the film was widely denounced for its depravity and censored by the Motion Picture Association; the picture was cited as an inspiration for a particularly heinous murder and withdrawn from circulation. Lawrence Tierney claimed that he resented being cast as homicial thugs and that he was really just a "good guy" -- but there's no evidence for this self-characterization: he was violent alcoholic who was imprisoned more than 12 times for bloody barroom brawls and once drew a knife on Jerry Seinfeld.)
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