Robert Wise’s Born To Kill (1947) is a nasty noir. Its kick comes from the way that it mercilessly shows that the beguiling masculinity of good-looking, man’s man Sam (Lawrence Tierney) is a thin façade above a toxic pit of entitlement, jealousy, paranoia and violence. Yet, the movie saves most of its real venom for Helen (Claire Trevor), the woman who falls for Sam. The villain’s a homme fatale, but the femme has to be the real poison, and so Born to Kill makes Sam’s misogyny in no small part its own.
The movie starts in Reno, where Helen’s gone to get a quicky divorce from her husband. Another woman in the boarding house, Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell) is dating Sam, and decides to see another guy to make him jealous and more invested. Sam finds out and cold-bloodedly murders Laury and her other suitor.
Helen discovers the bodies, but tells no one because she doesn’t want to get involved, and heads back to San Francisco. Sam’s on the same train. Soon he’s marrying her wealthy foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long), fooling around with Helen on the side, and laying plots to murder those investigating the murder, or anyone who looks at him sideways.
Lawrence Tierney as Sam is big and smoldering; women swoon over his broad shoulders and soulful eyes. Helen declares that, unlike most men, Sam is “not a turnip.” He says he knows what he wants and intends to get it, and when he says it looking at Helen, she just about starts to drool. “You’re strength and excitement—and depravity,” she whispers as they paw each other in the kitchen of Georgia’s house. “There is a kind of corruption inside you, Sam.” He looks delighted, as much by the words as the cares.
The dangerous bad boy is supposed to be exciting because he breaks rules and seizes the reins of the patriarchy, refusing to let anything get between him and the success that defines real men. But Born to Kill makes it clear that Sam’s rule-breaking isn’t strategic or a sign of mastery. He’s an entitled child driven by pique, rage and venom. He commits a double homicide not because he cares for the woman who’s two-timing him, but because he refuses to let another man “cut him out.” Marty pleads with him, “You can't just go around killin' people whenever the notion strikes you. It's not feasible.” But Sam insists it is; he should be able to do anything to anyone anytime he feels like it.
Along those lines, he petulantly demands to be put in charge of Georgia’s newspaper business despite having no experience not because he cares about the newspaper business, but because he wants the sadistic thrill of being able to make his underlings’ lives miserable. He murders his best friend Marty (Elisha Cook Jr.) based on jealous fantasy and vindictiveness.
Sam’s the opposite of strong. He’s a man with no convictions, no brains, no determination. All he’s got is a pretty face, an inflated sense of self-regard and a blunt sadism.
Helen seems made of sterner stuff—and she also has more in the way of real grievances. Her wealthy foster parents refused to provide for her, so she’s stuck relying on the largesse of her sister. To escape that situation, and on the rebound from a first marriage that we hear nothing about, she gets engaged to Fred (Philip Terry) a wealthy businessman.
But Helen’s mercenary head can’t silence her heart; she sees in Sam the passion she’s denied herself, and soon she’s running around cleaning up his messes, offering to buy off cheerfully corrupt detective Arnett (Walter Slezak) and threatening the dead Laury’s best friend Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard). She also keeps stealing kisses with Sam. Fred, who, not a complete dolt, eventually figures out that she doesn’t really love him, and dumps her, leaving her despairing.
Helen’s messed up and isn’t a moral or admirable person. She should’ve reported the initial murder to the police right away, or at least told others in the house about it. She doesn’t because she doesn’t want trouble—and she says because she’s worried Fred would dislike the scandal. That’s not admirable.
It's also not an unforgivable sin. When we meet Helen at the beginning of the film, she’s not someone who goes around murdering and blackmailing people. That only starts after Sam—or her idea of Sam—dazzles her. She falls for an abusive guy with a good line of patter, ends up doing terrible things, and then he kills her. This isn’t pretty, but you’re generally supposed to have some sympathy for the key seduced by the femme fatale. Shouldn’t that work similarly when the genders are reversed?
But it doesn’t. Instead, as the end of the movie approaches, director Wise has characters line up to tell Helen that she’s unfeeling and manipulative. “You’re the coldest iceberg of a woman I ever saw and the rottenest inside,” Mrs. Kraft hisses. In a more urbane tone, Arnett unleashes a Biblical quote upon her, “I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and he who falls beneath their spell has need of God's mercy.”
Again, Helen does some pretty terrible things; she even, in a last moment of duress, urges Sam to kill Georgia, who’s just threatened to cut Helen off without a cent. But Mrs. Kraft’s analysis of her evil, and Arnett’s (and for that matter her fiancé’s) are bizarrely off base. Helen doesn’t do cruel and wrong things in the film because she’s cold; she does them because she’s consumed with sexual lust for Sam. Nor is her heart a snare and a net; it’s not her who captures Sam and leads him astray, but he who captures her.
Born To Kill is a story about how Sam and Helen, men and women, mistake self-deluded entitlement, jealous mania, and murderous violence for attractive, assured, vibrant masculinity. And yet, the movie spends much of its moral energy denouncing overly ambitious women, using as its case in point an orphan whose foster parents screwed her over and left her, to all appearances, desperate for both money and love.
It's not surprising that the movie focuses on female iniquity; classic film noir is a misogynist genre, which fetishizes strong, evil women only to put them in their place in the final reel. In that context, what’s surprising, and welcome, in Born To Kill is the way it deftly analyzes and condemns toxic masculinity, showing just how blankly unattractive it is. And yet, the movie still ends up blaming the woman the toxic man guns down.