Jail Bait

Well, I now know why Jail Bait isn’t really mentioned when people are discussing Ed Wood’s oeuvre, and as I had guessed yesterday, it’s because it’s terminally boring. If I don’t want to commit to saying it’s the worst film noir I’ve ever watched, that’s mainly because I have a bad enough memory that, while I certainly can’t remember any that were worse, there’s always an outside chance that there was and I just blocked it out of my mind.

The plot concerns an attempted heist that goes wrong, in which the elderly night watchman is killed. Of the two would be robbers, the one that shot the watchman is wracked with guilt, and decides to confess, and is subsequently killed by his partner, who then demands that his partner’s father, a renowned plastic surgeon, give him a new face so that he can evade the police. Of course, the father has his own ideas…

Reading that, one can imagine, if not a great story, at least a serviceable one. That’s not what we get here. Instead, what we get is so dull that I want to go to sleep just thinking back on it. Wood directs this in as generic a manner as possible, planting the camera down Kevin Smith style and just assuming the material is good enough to carry the film, despite his amateur actors (just like in Glen or Glenda?, he cast his girlfriend Dolores Fuller in a prominent role) behaving in such a stiff manner one could almost suspect they were reading off of cue cards (aside from Herbert Rawlinson, who plays the old doctor -- he keeps pausing halfway through each sentence because he‘s trying to remember his lines, so he obviously isn‘t reading off of any cue cards), as they no doubt had absolutely no time to rehearse the material at all. To be fair, there is one future star in Steve Reeves, in his first film role before finding fame in a long series of gladiator movies, but outside of randomly showing off his abs he really doesn’t do much here.

It’s a shame too, because there are honestly some good moments in the story (as there would have to be, to balance out the hideous inappropriateness of the blackface routine early on), such as the idea of the plastic surgery, which to my knowledge had only been done once before in the gimmicky Humphrey Bogart vehicle Dark Passage (and which is done more like Face/Off here, half a century before that movie was made). It’s just executed so poorly at every turn that it’s impossible to enjoy any moment of it, even at such moments when the witness to the attempted robbery points the finger at the murderer and says she saw it happen even when we know full well she didn’t. In a better movie her false claims to have witnessed the whole event would lead somewhere. Here it’s just a continuity error.

There’s not much I can really say about this movie. It isn’t written that badly, surprisingly enough, but the acting and directing just crush any possible entertainment value the film might have otherwise had. I can honestly say that I feel sorry for any young film buff whose first experience to film noir is somehow this movie here, because it’s about as low as the genre goes (to say nothing of the wildly misleading title). Go check out Go check out The Third Man or Kiss Me Deadly or something instead, so that you’ll feel better about yourself after this ordeal. You’ve earned it.

Rating: *