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!

This noir film directed by Robert Wise is bereft of characters you can sympathize with save for Audrey Long and Phillip Terry. It does however rivet your attention to the leads of Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor, a pair of amorals if I ever saw one.Back in Reno where Trevor was getting shed of a husband she happens to discover the murders of Isabelle Jewell and Tony Barrett done by a very jealous man played by Lawrence Tierney whom she meets on the train to San Francisco. They like each other, but he focuses on Audrey Long, Trevor's half sister who was lucky enough to have a father worth a fortune.But Tierney's past is ever so slowly creeping up on him. And Trevor while now engaged to Terry, still she can't resist Tierney. Pity these two just didn't hitch, they truly deserve each other and not the people they were going with.What I love about Born To Kill is the great care that Robert Wise took in both assembling his supporting cast and fleshing them out. Rarely do you see that in a B film. Those already mentioned plus Elisha Cook, Jr. as Tierney's luckless pal, Walter Slezak as a private detective open to a little blackmail, and Esther Howard as the landlady in Reno who hires Slezak to investigate the murder of her friend Jewell.Born To Kill will keep you glued to the television or the big screen as it did in 1946 I'm sure. A truly fascinating bunch.

Mrs. Helen Brent (Claire Trevor) gets a Reno divorce. Her boarding house neighbor Laury Palmer and her boyfriend are killed by the jealous Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney). He has control issues and those may not be his first murders. Helen finds the bodies but leaves to avoid getting involved. She travels to San Francisco on the train and strikes up a flirtatious relationship with Sam. She is engaged to the wealthy Fred Grover. Georgia Staples is her sister. Sam is obsessed and Helen is conflicted. The boarding house madam hires private detective Albert Arnett to find the killer. He follows Sam's friend Marty to San Francisco.This is an amoral potboiler noir directed by Robert Wise. It's very pulpy. Helen is a gold-digger and Sam is a crazed killer. There are no saints in this story. The material is solid ugliness although the visual style is a little lacking. It probably irk a few people back during those days and serves as an interesting cinematic sign post.

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.