Born To Be Bad

This poorly cast RKO pot-boiler has Joan Fontaine as a manipulative woman who gets wealthy scion (played by Zachary Scott), to marry her after breaking up his fiancé (Joan Leslie) and dumping her boyfriend (Robert Ryan). Mel Ferrer is thrown into the pot as a gay society painter.

Badly written and dully directed, nothing convinces, in particular, Fontaine who made a speciality of playing nervously demure women and who, the attractively lurid title notwithstanding, is no femme fatale. Robert Ryan's novelist is nearly as unconvincing as Robert Mitchum's artist in John Brahm's The Locket (1946) which at least offered a motive for female protagonist's comparable deceptions. If you want to see a film that does this sort of thing brilliantly, see Anne Baxter claw her way to the top in All About Eve which was released the same year.

 

Want something different?