Deadlier Than the Male...
Do you remember the scene in King Kong (1933) when little Fay Wray was trapped in the hand of the mighty ape?
Slowly, he begins to peel away her clothing as she struggles in vain. More curious than lustful, Kong strips away layer after layer of her garments, holding them up to his nose before discarding them and turning back to his little blonde plaything.
Fay Wray is of course convinced (as are we, presumably) that she is about to meet A Fate Worse Than Death, but no, Kong halts his exploration before he gets too close to any excessively naughty bits. He does tickle her a couple of times, and he sniffs his fingers, the big pervert.
They are then attacked by a Pterodactyl.
If you don't recall any of this, it might be because the entire scene was cut by the censors in 1938, and wasn't properly restored until 2005 (along with a few other choice moments).
King Kong, like so many other films of the early 30s, had been deemed "objectionable" by the Legion of Decency, and was duly sliced and diced by the Hays Office.
By the late 1930s, Hollywood was almost completely subservient to the moral standards of the Catholic Church.
Every year, the Legion of Decency published a pamphlet in which each cinema release was given a "rating" based on its moral worthiness, from A-1 (Morally Unobjectionable for General Patronage) to C (Condemned). The Bishops tasked with watching all this godless entertainment were particularly "triggered" by plotlines featuring divorce (no, no, no!) or (shudder) "planned parenthood" as well as anything which encouraged the "the unethical taking of the law into one's own hands."
This was the climate of the 1940s (when most of the films now considered prime examples of "noir" were released) and for many film-makers, telling a compelling story meant playing an endless cat-and-mouse game with the morality police.
As I have previously observed, the restrictions of the censors meant that wrong-doers in films of that era were only ever headed for one possible outcome. But that didn't mean that film-makers could pack their stories with unfiltered depravity so long as the guilty were eventually punished. There were plenty of topics that were considered so incendiary that their very mention was enough to bring down the Wrath of the Righteous.
And nearly all of those topics are present in the film we'll be screening this week...
Morally Disgusting, Malignant and Unsavoury. Oh My!
When, in 1942, RKO Studios finally decided that Orson Welles' second feature (The Magnificent Ambersons) had spiralled irrevocably out of control and beyond any hope of his ever actually completing the damn thing, they took the project out of his hands and gave it to the film's editor, in the hopes that this young man might salvage what he could out of the property.
The editor in question was someone the studio was happy to trust. Even though he had never directed a film of his own, he was a veteran professional with years of experience by that point, and someone who was already well-versed in the mechanics of making a movie.
The young editor's name was Robert Wise.
By the time Robert Wise died in 2005 (at the age of 91) he had directed films in virtually every genre, and many of those films are remembered today as amongst the very best in their categories. But the specific film I plan to screen this week is his very first venture into the world of noir, and is one of the filthiest, sleaziest films of the entire era.
Born to Kill is that rarest of beasts: a film noir told from the perspective of the femme fatale.
The story follows Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) a newly-divorced socialite who befriends a tough, vaguely psychotic Neanderthal of a man (Lawrence Tierney) who, unbeknownst to her (at first, anyway) has just committed a particularly brutal double-murder.
(A murder that Helen had discovered, but did not report.)
Before the film reaches its inevitable (and Hays-Office-mandated) conclusion, it will have dabbled in murder, infidelity, corruption, homosexuality (remember those Bishops and the Legion of Decency?) and serial promiscuity (those Bishops again).
I personally think that accusing it of "incest" is overstating things rather, but some analyses have even gone that far.
Bosley Crowther, in his New York Times review, did not pull his punches.
This crime-flaunting melodrama [...] is not only morally disgusting but is an offense to a normal intellect. In the first place, the story is malignant, being a cheap and unsavory tale of a hard-hearted murderer's fascination for a self-seeking divorcée. [...] The whole atmosphere and detail of corruption is so indulgently displayed that it looks as though the aim of the producers was to include as much as possible, within the limits of the Production Code.
So... no sound-bites from Bosley Crowther on the film posters.
As brutal and cruel as Lawrence Tierney's character is shown to be, he is no match for Claire Trevor, who turns in a memorable performance as one of the most nuanced and three-dimensional femmes fatale of the era.
Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck may have lured defenceless men to their doom, but Claire Trevor's character here is far more than a male object of desire. She not only has a story arc of her own, she is in fact the central character of the film. If anything, Lawrence Tierney is her object of desire.
The film may have been released as Born to Kill, but the source novel was entitled Deadlier Than the Male, which gives you an idea of just who is menacing whom in this particular story.
Robert Wise eventually went on to direct West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Run Silent Run Deep (to name just a very, very few) but with Born to Kill he showed the world (and the Legion of Decency!) that he wasn't afraid to plumb the very depths of the human psyche.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
We will screen Born to Kill at 7.30 on Thursday, the 27th of February at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
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