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!

"Born to Kill" tells the story of a man and a woman, but mostly the man. Played by Lawrence Tierney, Sam is a simple man--as simple as the shark from Jaws. He is a predator and a sociopath. He may not be constantly moving, but when he does stand still, his brain is calculating his next move toward conquest. He trusts no one. He has a persecution complex and believes everyone is out to put him down. His life strategy is to put the other guy down first.Tierney is the perfect person to portray Sam. Robert Osborne, host of TCM, said he thinks Tierney looks like he has a jaw of granite. He fills the screen with menace. Even when he attempts to behave sociably, a cloud inevitably passes over his face--resulting from some perceived slight--and he is back to a squint and a snarl."Born to Kill" is adapted from the novel "Deadlier Than the Male", but Sam is the definition of deadly. He runs into a woman who has the perception to see him at his core (because she sees herself similarly), but is Helen (Claire Trevor) really any match for a predator?The story is filled with supporting actors who somehow hold their own with the two powerful leads. Elisha Cook, Jr. plays Marty, Sam's cohort who is a cold calculator. Esther Howard plays Mrs. Kraft--a landlady who is rough around the edges and to her core. She loves only two things: her neighbor, Laury, and a bottle of beer. Howard plays the part with gusto. It feels like she takes this role from the script and makes it her own. When Laury is murdered, Mrs. Kraft hires a private detective, a Mr. Arnett (played by Walter Slezak). Slezak holds your attention when he is on screen. He is an "operative" who just gets by, a man who would probably take any job that pays the bills. He is literate, willing to take risks, and overtly intelligent. They could have built a few more films around his character.When Helen realizes she cannot afford to keep a man as volatile as Sam around forever, she steers Arnett in his direction. Proving that she is as sinister as Sam, she gives him a kiss to keep him close. She is as ruthless as Sam, but Sam has no conscience. At one point, she compares Sam with her fiancé Fred. She says, "Fred is goodness" and "you're depravity". It's a depravity she can identify with, and she knows she can never trust Sam, but she flies to close to his flame for too long.Sam stupidly lets slip details of the murder scene, which Helen notices. What remains is the inevitable resolution of the conflict between Sam's evilness and Helen's revenge. It's a dark story dominated by an iconic character who exudes villainy.It has been suggested that Tierney did little acting in this film, that he was--in real life--as tough and coarse as the character he portrayed. If so, there is no wonder he is so convincing.This film did not do well at the box office, and critics savaged the film for its lack of morality. Imagine how audiences viewed this film in 1947. Now we know it was ahead of its time.

Lady of Deceit (AKA: Born to Kill) is directed by Robert Wise and adapted to screenplay by Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay from the novel Deadlier than the Male written by James Gunn. It stars Claire Trevor, Lawrence Tierney, Walter Slezak, Elisha Cook Jr., Audrey Long, Isabel Jewell and Esther Howard. Music is by Paul Sawtell and cinematography by Robert De Grasse.Trevor plays conniving divorcée Helen Brent, who risks her chances at the wealth and security she craves with the man she doesn't love by falling for hotheaded murderer Sam Wild (Tierney), who, with his own agenda, is soon to marry her foster sister.I wouldn't trade places with you if they sliced me into little pieces.Hard-bitten noir of some substance that pits two of noir's most unlikable characters against each other. Tierney's psychotic machismo and Trevor's calculating sex-bomb go head to head in a deliriously distorted romance that will only go one way once their inner pursuit of glory comes to the fore.And he who falls beneath her spell has need of God's mercy.The plot is a bit hard to take, but when in noirville it sometimes helps to stop off for a bite to eat at the fantastique café. It's a grim tale of pathological persons and it's superbly directed by Wise in what was his first foray into straight edged film noir. Slezak adds some seedy quality as a bible quoting P.I., Cook Junior does what he does best and Jewell inputs the naive sexy glamour.Voluptuous violence and mad love in the shadows. Hooray! 8/10

Born to Kill is one film noir that surely deserves its title. Lawrence Tierney plays a ruthless, psychopathic character named Sam Wild. That he was 'born' to kill is confirmed in the first few moments of the picture, when the man kills an innocent couple out of sheer jealousy and sudden outburst of aggression.The only person to see the bodies lying lifelessly on the floor is a beautiful woman Helen Trent (Claire Trevor), whose divorce has just come through, but she really doesn't want to get involved in the whole murderous affair and decides not to tell anybody about what she saw. The whole narrative changes abruptly, as the two characters meet on-board of a train bound for San Francisco, and instantly fall in love. Realizing that Helen is already married to another man, Sam decides to fall for her wealthy, tender and enthusiastic half-sister Georgia (Audrey Long), just to make Helen jealous and unhappy. Even though they're both in relationships, their whopping yet disastrous love flourishes. Unfortunately, the detectives starts snooping around in order to find the double murderer. Enter Marty (Elisha Cook Jr.), Sam's old pal, who arrives in San Francisco and brings the cops along with him. In a sudden and unexpected turn of events, Marty is found dead and the two doomed lovers continue their illicit love affair. Even when Helen is sure that Sam is the true killer, she doesn't stop loving him. In the intense finale Sam is finally caught and faces arrest, but he decides that he won't back down now and commits the one last crime...Born to Kill is a rather uneven, yet distressingly macabre melodrama with a nifty storyline and a typically-noirish mix of failed romance and cold-blooded murder. Though it's hardly original in its themes, it still entangles the audiences with its tense, moody atmosphere and Lawrence Tierney's most sinister role ever.