Robert Wise’s Born to Kill (1947) brings dramatic and romantic tension to fans of film noir with two powerful characters that match and mirror each other’s energy and intractability – the ruthless Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney) and the venturesome Helen Brent (Claire Trevor).
With two young people’s blood on his hands, Sam meets Helen, who knew one of the victims, and the two fall for each other, but they keep it private. Things take an unexpected turn when Helen’s wealthy foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long) falls for Sam’s charm and he decides to marry her for her money. Helen and Sam find themselves beside and against each other at the same time in a dangerous game where one wrong move could spell doom for both.
Born to Kill is noir chiseled with conflict and twists to the bone. It’s an intense drama of the killer versus the femme fatale where the two can’t live without each other but once together, they can’t keep their hands off each other’s throats. Of the two, Helen leads the story and conflict with shifting shades of character. Both Sam and Helen’s characters gain accent from their respective foils – Fred (Phillip Terry) and Georgia. Walter Slezak as the crooked detective Albert Arnett adds a layer of complexity to the plot.
In Born to Kill, the story has a good proportion of action and dialogue though the latter dominates despite a lot happening from the opening scene to the closing shot. The plot leans toward melodrama and, for its time, the movie was considered rather violent in the noir genre.
It’s left to the viewer to decide who came up with the more fulsome title for this story – James Gunn for his only novel Deadlier than the Male, on which the movie is based, or the movie Born to Kill; the latter does sound less suggestive of bias against any gender in the tale.
