By 1950, Joan Fontaine had already won herself an Academy Award for her performance in Suspicion, as well as nominations in Rebecca and The Constant Nymph. She was a well-respected actress with a promising career ahead of her. Then she started taking parts of a darker nature. Films like Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, while well acted, were not hitting audiences or critics in the same way her earlier successes had. It was during this time that she took on the role of Christabel Caine in the noir melodrama Born to Be Bad. While this movie allows her to be sexy and deceitful, it also has no inclination to be more than just a generic story about a scheming woman who can’t get out of her own way when it comes to what she really wants. Instead of another acting showcase, we get plodding dialogue, poor use of camera work, and a script that is often just painful to watch unfold.
Christabel is a woman who wants what isn’t hers, then grows tired of having it. This story begins when she arrives in San Francisco to attend business school, moving in with her aunt Donna (Joan Leslie). Soon she is proving to be a socially ambitious tramp who sets her eyes on Donna’s fiancé, the wealthy Curtis Carey (Zachary Scott). Through some manipulation, she inserts a wedge between these two, breaking up their engagement. She is also attracted to aspiring author Nick Bradley (Robert Ryan), though she doesn’t allow that attraction to stop her from pursuing and marrying Curtis. But after she and Curtis are married, she can’t stop pining for Nick and she grows distant with Curtis, spending more time on social activities than with her husband. When Nick returns, having successfully published his first book, Curtis cannot help but notice something is going on between him and his wife.
There is nothing of particular merit to this obvious and unnecessary feature film. Director Nicholas Ray seems to not trust his audience to follow what is going on so he falls back on a camera trick where we hover often on the faces of our characters when the person they are with can’t see the expressions. It hammers home emotions we already get from earlier in the scenes, treating us like we aren’t smart enough to read between the lines. It’s uninspiring and unnecessary. Worse, it is in service of such a weak story that it isn’t even worth overlooking in favor of the bigger picture.
This is such a poorly constructed story that watching it is a fruitless effort. There is nothing to this that makes it worth the time, including Joan Fontaine, who is never quite convincing in a role that supposedly was similar to who she was in real life, at least when it came to her relationship with her sister, Olivia de Havilland. She’s poorly conceived, but Joan isn’t entirely to blame for this. Nicholas Ray shouldn’t take all the blame for this misfire, either. There is only so much you can do with a script like this one. A great director can make a bad script serviceable. Ray is more of a director for hire, though, so when he gets a bad script, that’s the kind of movie he makes out of it. It doesn’t even have a satisfying ending. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot: This is the way the film ends. Not with a bang but a whimper. 1950 - 94 minutes
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