 Starring: Loretta Young, Cary Grant, Jackie Kelk
Director: Lowell Sherman
Year Of Release: 1934
Plot: Letty Strong is an unwed mother who’s a tramp and will do anything (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) and scam anyone to get ahead. She’s raising her son, Mickey, to play loose with the rules, and he’s already getting in trouble at school and running riot, especially as his mother is out with a different man each night. However when she involves her kid in a con where he pretends to have been badly injured after being run over by a milk truck, the court realises her ruse. Mickey is then taken away from her and ends up with the man who runs the dairy, Mal. However Letty wants her son back. |
Born To Be Bad is most interesting for how it relates to two other recent Movie-A-Day films,
The Blue Angel and yesterday’s
Bonnie & Clyde.
It’s particularly relevant to what I was talking about with The Blue Angel. In case you haven’t read that Movie-A-Day article, it’s about how sexy foreign films became popular in the late 20s and early 30s, while Hollywood went through a moral panic and tried to clean up its act. However because the studios couldn’t manage to stay away from movies about loose women (because they made a lot of money), the continuing moral outrage ended up with them having to agree to a strict production code in the mid-30s, which dictated which subjects could and couldn’t be handled on the screen, and basically removed women who openly flaunted they sexuality (it was still there, but you had to read between the lines) from cinemas for the next 30 years.
Born To Be Bad is one of the last more flagrant loose women movies Hollywood made before the crackdown. It’s about a young lady who (prepare to be shocked) became an unwed mother at the age of 15, uses men to live a refined life and swaps their services for sexual favours. She’s basically one step up from a prostitute and while the film doesn’t come out and bluntly state what she gets up to, it does little to hide it either.
The movie is basically a morality tale, where she has to learn that maybe her son would be better off being brought up by someone else because she’s such a bad influence on him, but even so Born To Be Bad enjoys playing with the fact she’s a free spirit, who’s utterly unapologetic about her lascivious ways. Indeed, the reason she ends up deciding her child would be better with someone else, is because she doesn’t want to change and although she loses her son, she retains her freedom to engage in as much crime and sex as she likes. In fact Born To Be Bad rather seems to admire her, as long as she doesn’t have a kid to corrupt.
Even during production the censors had trouble with the film. While the Production Code wasn’t being strictly enforced when the movie was shot in 1933, the Hay’s Office (which was in charge of Hollywood censorship) still had some powers and they weren’t keen on this film about a sexy woman who was pretty much a glorified whore. As a result at least two sets of reshoots were required before it was given a certificate. Even then it met with some resistance and is certainly an example of the sort of movie that organisations like the Catholic League of Decency were getting so upset about at the time.
Born To Be Bad is a lot more sexually forward and morally ambiguous than films were from the mid-30s to the mid-60s, once the Production Code started to be strictly enforced (the movie ended up on a list of supposedly morally corrupt films that the Hay’s Office thought should be pulled from release when they started cracking down). Even so, despite the film’s titillation seeming shocking back then, nowadays it’s only got a U certificate in the UK (equivalent of a G in the US), which just goes to show how far the moral base has shifted over the last 75 years.
The movie is also a fairly interesting counterpoint to what I was talking about yesterday in relation to Bonnie & Clyde. The Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway film came very close to disappearing into obscurity when Warner only gave it a minor release and shoved it onto lesser screens. However thanks to the studio realising the film was getting a positive response from counterculture critics and that young people liked it, it re-released the film, gave it a major push and it became a massive, groundbreaking hit, and a modern classic.
Born To Be Bad is almost the opposite. Despite being vaguely historically interesting because it was one of the last morally suspect, pre-Production Code crackdown movies, it is a very minor film. It’s less than an hour long and essentially a low-rent b-movie, with some dodgy acting (although the rapid-fire dialogue of 30s films, where everyone talks ridiculously fast, is always fun), a join-the-dots script and a very standard and unimaginative morality tale plot. It is a film that pretty much deserves to have been forgotten completely, as it’s not even a particularly entertaining example of the sort of fallen women flick that was popular back then. It's main plus points are a great title and a rather cool poster (see right).
However it had the good fortune to star a young Gary Grant. His film career had only started a couple of years before (although with the ridiculously fast pace they churned out this sort of throwaway, production line movie back then, which were only supposed to half a shelf life of a few weeks, it was nevertheless his 16th film). At the time, while he’d made the likes of Blonde Venus alongside Marlene Deitrich –who was, of course, the star of The Blue Angel and then brought her sexy woman act to Hollywood – and Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong, Grant was very much a star on the rise rather than a major player. In fact with Born To Be Bad, he had so little Hollywood clout that he got second billing to the now almost completely forgotten Loretta Young.
In the film Grant plays a supporting role that gives him little chance to show off his trademark wit, and to be honest, if anyone else had played the part, it wouldn’t have made any difference. However while the film should just have disappeared into obscurity, because of the presence of a young Cary Grant, it’s still around today and got a DVD release as part of Fox’s Studio Classics range, is featured in Cary Grant box sets and has generally achieved a longevity it really doesn’t deserve.
It is the 1930s equivalent of all those DVDs you see in bargain bins of rubbish films that star famous people before they hit the big time. However purely because it’s 75 years old and stars someone who’d later become a screen legend, Born To Be Bad gets treated by 20th Century Fox as if it’s actually a worthwhile film that should still be held in high esteem today.
It just goes to show that while a great film like Bonnie & Clyde can get within inches of disappearing into obscurity, other films end up getting a shelf-life that’s far longer than they deserve, purely because they happen to have starred someone who later became a screen legend. It hardly seems fair, does it?
TIM ISAAC
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