From the 1950s: Born to Be Bad

1950 Drama

From RKO

Directed by Nicholas Ray

Starring

Joan Fontaine

Robert Ryan

Zachary Scott

Joan Leslie

Mel Ferrer

Harold Vermilyea

Virginia Farmer

Here comes a lively, vicious film about a scheming, manipulative woman who sets her sights on marrying a wealthy man, completely ignoring his fiancée whose apartment she resides in, while carrying on a passionate affair with another man.  The story of the femme fatale is certainly not original but director Nick Ray approaches it in his usual unorthodox style and gives it a different look.

Christabel is an unusual name and she's an unusual woman.  Or maybe she's not so unusual but she fascinates the hell out of me either way for 90 minutes.  There she (Fontaine) is sitting on Donna's (Leslie) sofa,  With all the people milling about to prepare for the party Donna is throwing that night, it wasn't difficult to simply come in and sit down.  It was also calculated... she wanted to startle Donna... she wanted to make her first appearance dramatic.

Soon she has manipulated Donna into letting her spend the night.  The two women could never become good friends... and are certainly nothing alike.  Soon Christabel meets Gobby (Ferrer), a free-spirited, elegant painter.  It doesn't take the savvy soul but minutes to figure her out.  She is a liar and a scam artist and in his way he tells her so.  She will blush and purr oh Gobby but she pays him little mind.  That is until he says he would like to paint her portrait.

Along with assorted guests, Curtis (Scott) arrives.  Christabel is told he has very deep pockets and is Donna's fiancé.  We notice her eyes flashing and her nostrils quivering.  Gobby notices it, too, and tells her to tread lightly.  She knows the smell of money.  She'd be the type to saunter up to a man and say is that a wad of bills in your pocket or is that a wad of bills in your pocket?  She didn't care about propriety, respect, decency, honor or anything but money.    

Nick (Ryan) arrives.  Christabel is attracted to Nick in a way that she is not at all attracted to Curtis.  Nick is raw, tough and all man.  He likes to dominate and she likes a man who thinks he does.  (Ryan usually invests a little psycho in his roles but not here.)  He's also just sent his first novel to a publisher and Christabel is happier yet... she likes accomplished people.  He wants her to marry him but she refuses.  She keeps her own counsel on keeping Curtis and Nick just where she wants them.  She no more wants to marry Nick than she wants to sleep with Curtis.  

Nick's publisher, John Caine (Vermilyea) is Donna's employer and Christabel is John's niece.  He and his wife Clara (Farmer) are good friends with all of the main characters.  Caine is becoming suspicious that his niece is a social climber who displays no particular talent herself and could probably not make it in life without attaching herself to a rich man.  It makes him sad that he feels this way.

Donna sees that Curtis seems to spend a lot of time with Christabel and she is dismayed that the schemer is turning Curtis's head on so many matters.  Donna leaves for Europe on some business venture and while she is gone Christabel and Curtis marry.  

As the lady of the manor she throws herself into charities and luncheons and spending sprees and just about everything except Curtis.  In a good confrontation scene he tells her he is not happy in their marriage and insists that they go away for a few days.  She resists and he persists.

Fontaine eyeing Leslie and Scott

At a lodge while Curtis is off doing some hunting, Christabel departs, leaving Curtis a note telling him that she has gone off to see Aunt Clara who is ill.  He suspects it's a lie and that she has gone off to see Nick because a call log at the lodge reveals a call to Nick's phone.

When she returns home to an agitated Curtis, he asks her how her Aunt Clara is doing.  She responds that her aunt is doing much better and as she flutters about, her uncle, whom she doesn't know is standing some distance behind her, says Christabel, your Aunt Clara died this afternoon.  Curtis boots her out of his home.  It's over.  I had to chuckle at the ending... thank you, Mr. Ferrer.

As studio head Howard Hughes was watching a rough cut of the picture, he insisted that an extra scene be added so Scott and Leslie were called back for a location shoot at the airport where he's just landed his small plane... and they reunite.

This was only Nick Ray's fifth directorial effort.  His prior films had also been made at RKO where Howard Hughes was rather fond of the maverick director... Hughes, of course, knowing a little something about being a maverick.  Born to Be Bad was then known as Bed of Roses but Hughes preferred a title with more allure.

Ray could be a tough guy to work with and not all actors who worked for him got along with him.  This would be Ray's first of five films with Robert Ryan and the two seemed very similar types although offscreen Ryan was a very squared-away guy and Ray certainly was not.  He insisted that Ryan was hired as he did with Leslie and Scott.

Fontaine was foisted upon him.  She apparently became afraid of him and he made her nervous while he found her to be an insufferable prima donna.  She would one day title her autobiography No Bed of Roses.  Hmmmm.  But she owned a percentage of the property and Hughes wooed her into making the film by giving her the salary she wanted and about every other perk she asked for.

Ray never liked typical Hollywood endings.  They bored him silly.  He could easily have had Christabel repent (I'm sure he never considered it and such an ending would have greatly weakened the story) or had her die (she would have deserved this but way too common in films) or she could be run off with all her furs in the backseat of her convertible, a smile on her face and looking forward to her next pawn (which is what he chose).

Christabel, despite her constant smiles and demure manner, is an obvious schemer and everyone except Curtis seems to know it.  I always thought the story had an obvious flaw in this regard.  Since she is so obviously a wicked person, why do any of these characters put up with her? 

Scott, Fontaine and Ferrer

While all characters tell Christabel what they think of her, only Donna really lays into her with unvarnished truths and ends by telling her to move on and out of her life.  Somebody should have told the birds and bees about YOU, Donna hisses.  Ray loved the concept of the good girl v.s. the bad girl which he used in 1949's A Woman's Secret and would jubilantly sell a few years later in Johnny Guitar.  Unfortunately when Donna tells Christabel to move on, it is Donna who moves on and we don't see her again until the end of the film.  Too bad.  I would like to have seen more interaction between the two women and I think the story suffers a little as a result of not getting that.  (Of course I suffered because I was, at the time, absolutely bonkers over Leslie.)

Ray liked telling stories of women pushing men around... having their way with them.  He liked headstrong women at first and then rebelled against them.  He had no understanding of a man-woman relationship that worked.  His real-life relationships were usually fraught with peril.  His real-life wife, Gloria Grahame, could have been Christabel, not just on the screen but in real life.  He had a thing for working in some of his personal life into his films.  He liked Ryan because he saw them as being cut from the same cloth.  Maybe that's why Ryan's character is named Nick.

Ray was always into plumbing the psychological state of his protagonists.  His films were rarely short on character development.  Along with feuding women, he was drawn to stories about creative artists.

He frequently paid attention to architecture, particularly homes, which always inspires me.  Here those homes are full of staircases and complex paths leading through several levels and around corners.  The characters are moving up and down, back and forth along these paths and looking at  one another from room to room.  It all contributes to an intimacy that Ray wants us to grasp.  He gets us to do it without our being aware we're being manipulated... just as Christabel does.

Fontaine called the film disastrous in her bio, which it is not (nor is it trashy as some reviewers claimed) but surely she meant her experience of making it (because of Ray) was disastrous.  I thought she was absolutely on the mark as Christabel... Ray coaxed a good performance out of her.  I think the actress, like her character, perfectly understood treachery especially as it's swathed in feigned sincerity. She was never for a moment the shy, withdrawn English lasses she was given to playing.  She was a shrewd, tough businesswoman, a superb golfer, an adventurous pilot, an inveterate traveler, a poor spouse, a questionable mother, a cloying daughter, a pain-in-the-ass sister.  That sweetness and light persona was simply more acting.  

I thought Fontaine brought Christabel vividly to life because it's a character she understood very well.  That's why she also purchased the property in the first place.  I wonder why she had a most peculiar hairstyle throughout the entire film.  I also wonder why she brushed her hair back with her hand so often.  Was that the character looking for attention or the actress?  Another affectation was how she ran.  It is like she didn't have control of her arms and legs and viewing it is most distracting.  

Ryan and Fontaine enjoying a break

Ryan brought his craggy, moody, bossy presence to the proceedings, a character a little out-of-step with the others but so damned colorful.  Why he would be drawn to this woman is beyond me but it's fun to watch him take her down a notch at a time.  If you ever draw an honest breath, he tells her, I want to be there to hear it.

Scott's cuckold husband is not the most interesting role but it is refreshing to see him in a good-guy role for a change.  He had a strong screen presence even in weaker roles.  I liked Scott and Leslie together and they'd known one another for years as Warner Brothers contract players.  When he got his Joans mixed up, leaving Leslie for Fontaine, I wanted to take my riding crop to him.  Stupid Curtis. 

Leslie puts some pzzazz into the decorous Donna.  She's a strong character who has a spell of weakness and she pays the price for it.  Christabel knew she must get Donna to doubt herself and then the former would have her foot in the door.  Sadly it works.

Leslie was pleased with the role and her work.  She had a long career at Warners, in her most important films she was a teenager playing a wife.  But in later years the studio put her in a lot of silly junk.  When she left the studio it was with some bitterness on both sides which meant the other big studios blackballed her.  She did this RKO picture because Ray asked her to come aboard.  It's one of my favorite Leslie roles... I just wish it had been larger.   

Director Nick Ray

Ferrer, like Fontaine, comes to his role of an amusingly pretentious artist, because it's something he understood... and as always, I was amused.  Gobby claims he knows little about women.  He flits from character to character and says or does amusing things, momentarily relieving us of drama, but he mostly dishes with the girls.  Gobby is a little, teeny bit snobby, he probably knows where all the bodies are buried and he's a must for any gathering.  Let's see... what am I missing here?

The film was fashioned from the work of several writers but in its original form it was a novel by Anne Parrish called All Kneeling.  I'm guessing the author is the real-life Donna.

Gorgeous in black and white, filmed in California, great sets, easy to spend 90 minutes with this cast, good Nick Ray flick and a very, very smart blending of actress and character... well, I had a good time.

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