Alex da Silva Claire Trevor (Helen) returns home after a night out celebrating her divorce. When she arrives at her boarding house, she discovers that her fellow lodger Isabel Jewell (Laury) has been murdered along with boyfriend Tony Barrett (Danny). There is another boyfriend on the scene – psychotic Lawrence Tierney (Sam) – and you had better not make a monkey of him. He WILL kill you. The whole beginning sequence is well acted by all and throws you straight into the story. On discovering the bodies, Claire goes to call the police, picks up the phone but then stalls, puts the receiver down and walks away from the scene. She thinks and then returns to pick up the phone again……..and she calls the train station! Ha ha – fooled us all. It's at the train station where she meets the killer Tierney and a relationship is formed. There are complications to this relationship alongside the added pressure of boozy floozy landlady Esther Howard (Mrs Kraft) hiring PI Walter Slezak (Arnett) to find out who killed her lodger.All the cast are excellent, especially Claire Trevor and Esther Howard. They all have screen presence. The relationship between Tierney and fellow criminal Elisha Cook Jr (Marty) is given a very obvious gay subtext. Cook Jr is his bitch – no doubt about it. Tierney is scary and each member of the cast is given at least one powerful, emotional scene and delivers it as required. At the end of the film I think it's a bottle of beer for Ms Howard please!

James Hitchcock This is a film with three different titles; it was released in America as "Born to Kill", in the U.K. as "Lady of Deceit" and in Australia as "Deadlier than the Male", a misquotation from Kipling's "The Female of the Species". (Kipling actually wrote "more deadly than the male"). The British and Australian titles refer to the film's main female character Helen Brent, the American one probably to her partner-in-crime Sam Wilde who, pace Mr Kipling, is more deadly than the female. Helen may be callous and amoral, but it is Sam who is the really dangerous one. (Helen never actually kills anyone during the film; Sam kills several people).The action begins in Reno, Nevada, where Helen, a San Francisco socialite, has gone to obtain a divorce. (We never see Helen's husband or learn why their marriage broke down; this detail seems to have been a moralistic touch pandering to those cinema-goers who would automatically assume that any divorcée was a "bad woman"). While in the city she meets, and is attracted to, the handsome Sam, who follows her back to San Francisco. Sam has a motive for leaving Reno, quite apart from Helen's good looks. He has just murdered his unfaithful girlfriend Laury and her lover, motivated less by jealous passion than by an insane obsession with saving face; he will not allow anyone to (as he puts it) "make a monkey" out of him.In San Francisco Sam makes two discoveries. The first is that Helen is engaged to be married. (Indeed, it would appear that she became engaged even before her divorce was finalised). The second is that Helen has a step-sister, Georgia, who is not only equally attractive but also the really wealthy one of the family. Sam therefore starts paying court to Georgia and, after a whirlwind romance, marries her, but their marriage does not prevent him from pursuing an affair with Helen.The film is sometimes described as "film noir" because of its lurid and violent plot, but only a few scenes are shot in the classic expressionist noir style. Much of the action takes place in Helen and Georgia's elegant mansion, making it, in visual terms at least, more of a high society melodrama. Noir tended to be a male-dominated genre with female actors in secondary roles ("Gilda" is perhaps something of an exception), but here Lawrence Tierney as Sam and Claire Trevor as Helen are roughly equal in prominence. The strong female character in a central role recalls "women's pictures" such as "Mildred Pierce", with the obvious difference that the heroine of a "women's picture" was generally someone admirable, or at least likable, and Helen is far from being either of those things.The main problem with the film, in fact, is that none of the characters are particularly admirable or likable. Tierney and Trevor throw themselves into their roles with gusto, and there is a good cameo from Walter Slezak as a worldly, cynical private detective. (Neither his worldliness nor his cynicism prevents him from quoting from the Bible or from well-known hymns; his favourite quotation, taken from Reginald Heber's "From Greenland's Icy Mountains", is "Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile").The more virtuous characters, on the other hand, are generally weak or inconspicuous. Helen's fiancé Fred tends to fade into the background (although at least he has the sense to call off their engagement when he realises just how heartless Helen is). Audrey Long's Georgia comes across as weak and naïve; if she couldn't spot the arrogant, overbearing Sam as a wrong'un from the start she must have been naïve indeed.The film's other flaw is that characters often act in inexplicable ways. Although the story opens with a double murder, nobody seems to want to go to the police. (Indeed, the police do not make an appearance until the very end). Helen is the first to discover the bodies of Laury and her boyfriend, but for some reason doesn't think that a double killing is worth reporting to anyone. (Why?) Laury's landlady has her suspicions about Sam, but instead of reporting these suspicions to the police she decides to spend her own money in hiring a private detective to investigate. (Why?) Unanswered questions like these mean that the plot is full of holes.Robert Wise was a versatile director, able to turn his hand to a number of different genres. He started his career, for example, with that fine supernatural fantasy "Curse of the Cat People", and among his later hits was "West Side Story", one of the greatest musicals ever made. On the basis, however, of this overheated, lurid melodrama and of some of his other efforts in the genre, such as "The House on Telegraph Hill", I suspect that crime dramas may not have been his forte. 5/10

JohnHowardReid I'm amazed this movie is so popular at IMDb. Although it did play in my home town back in 1947 under the title "Deadlier Than the Male", I'd never even heard of it until I purchased the DVD when I noticed it was directed by Robert Wise. And a very noirish movie it is too, with great performances all around, especially from Claire Trevor (as the deadlier), Lawrence Tierney (as the deadly), Walter Slezak (as the Clayton's detective) and Audrey Long (as the lovely heroine), and not to forget the amazingly tough Isabel Jewel and super-sweaty Elisha Cook, Jr. Yes, these are exactly the sort of characters noir is made of! Martha Hyer and Ellen Corby play maids, but I didn't spot them. I missed Tommy Noonan's bell boy too! The stylish but not particularly noirish photography was the work of Robert de Grasse. Although IMDb gives the running time as 92 minutes, the DVD runs only 83 minutes. And the assistant director, Robert Weiss, is a bit of a mystery too. This is his only credit!

Red-Barracuda Born to Kill is a pretty hard edged film-noir. This is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that it has Lawrence Tierney in its lead role. Tierney was a pretty brutal character in real life and he certainly looks and acts the part. In this one he is violence incarnate. The character he plays is quite one dimensional but he is very convincing nevertheless. His evil is offset by the character played by Claire Trevor, who is the Machiavellian femme fatale who orchestrates Tierney's brutality behind the scenes. Trevor is very good in this more complex role. She is only matched by Walter Slezak who plays a low-life private investigator; Slezak basically steals every scene he is in.The plot-line is a fairly standard rise and fall narrative that many crime films had. The only real weakness to the story is in the marriage between Tierney and Trevor's rich half-sister. They make an incredibly unconvincing couple and you tend to forget they are even married most of the time. But this is a relatively minor complaint all things considered. The director is Robert Wise, who proved himself to be somewhat reliably versatile. He was responsible for films as different as the horror movie The Haunting and the science fiction film The Andromeda Strain; Born to Kill proves that he could certainly make an entertaining film-noir too.