Robert Wise’s noir is like a proficient but soulless cover song – the eventual Sound of Music auteur knows which black-and-white cords to strike but little idea how to inject his cops-and-crooks tales with an authentically fatalistic mood. Nonetheless, Born to Kill (based on James Gunn’s novel Deadlier Than the Male) has just enough malevolent sadism and rancid sensuality to make up for the director’s creaky navigation of society’s seedy underbelly. Recent divorcé Claire Trevor, jealous of her half-sister’s wealth, plans to marry a bland stud for his loot, but finds such plans torn asunder by her animalistic attraction to psycho Lawrence Tierney, whose similar hunger for money and power – which he achieves by marrying Trevor’s naïve sis – makes the two gold diggers “soul mates.” Wise’s direction is that of both a skilled technician (an opening murder and crime-scene discovery sequence are expressionistically fashioned) and a foreigner working in a milieu he understands intellectually but not emotionally, the action competent if slightly too tame for a supposedly sleazy story. Such shortcomings, however, aren’t the fault of either lead, the hysterical Trevor vamping it up with perpetually raised eyebrows and preeminent tough guy Tierney lacing the action with one-note depravity, nevermore so than when he crazily admits that he wants to scale the social ladder primarily “So I can spit in anyone’s eye.”
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