A Face do Crime

'Jail Bait', directed by the legendary Ed Wood, is an enjoyably bad attempt at Film Noir on a shoestring budget. The cast includes Lyle Talbot, Dolores Fuller and Timothy Farrell from Wood's classic 'Glen Or Glenda', as well as a very early appearance by Steve Reeves. Talbot once again plays a kindly cop, but this time Farrell is on the other side of the law, the nasty Vic Brady. Brady has corrupted Fuller's brother Don (Clancy Malone) the middle class son of a world renowned plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson). We first see Don being bailed out by his sister Marilyn (Dolores Fuller) after being caught carrying an unlicensed firearm. Despite his sister's concern and a stern lecture from Ins. Johns (Talbot), he continues to associate with small time crook Vic Brady. A robbery gone wrong results in the death of a Night Watchman. Don's conscience gets the better of him and he intends to give himself up, but Brady has other ideas... ideas which involve Dr. Gregor's skills as a plastic surgeon. The combination of Wood's trademark lousy dialogue and the stilted performances of the actors (especially Malone and Fuller) with Farrell's hammy Vic Brady and the nutty denouement make 'Jail Bait' a lot of fun to watch.

A morality play a la Reefer Madness, with guns instead of grass. Marilyn Gregor (Dolores Fuller), a fifties good-girl, is bailing out her brother Don (Clancy Malone), who's been run in for gun possession. Although Don's father is a prestigious plastic surgeon, Don Jr. has renounced this respectable profession in favor of a life of crime. He's pretty incorrigible if he's got a gun in his hand so after Marilyn drives him home, he gets a revolver from a hollowed out book to replace the one the cops confiscated and goes out to meet his henchman, Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell), at a downtown watering hole. It seems the two have one last caper to commit before bedtime: they hold up an office for $23,000 in theater payroll checks. Unfortunately, the holdup goes wrong; Don kills a security guard/retired cop and Vic tags a fleeing secretary but doesn't kill her. The cops arrive but Don and Vic shake them after a languid car chase that (maybe because Ed Wood forgot to get a shooting permit and didn't want anyone to know he was making a movie) obeys all traffic laws. They're safe for the time being but the secretary they failed to kill is a living witness so word gets out soon enough that Don is a cop killer. Choked by remorse, Don visits his father's office and Doctor Gregor convinces him to surrender to the authorities. But Vic catches Don there, takes him back to Vic's hideout, and after a brief altercation shoots him dead. Vic and his girlfriend Loretta (Theodora Thurman) trick Doctor Gregor the plastic surgeon into giving Vic a new face to escape the law, using for leverage a claim that they are holding Don hostage. When Doctor Gregor discovers that Don is already dead, he gets revenge by surreptitiously giving Vic Don's face. The police identify Vic as Don, the cop killer, and kill him after a quick and bloodless shootout. Justice having been done, we can all shake our heads ruefully and go home.

An essentially unremarkable cops-and-robbers potboiler, Jail Bait is pretty good evidence that Ed Wood gets far too much credit for making bad films. Though Wood's dialogue delivers the occasional trademark nonsequitur-when a police inspector (Lyle Talbot) explains to Marilyn that "carrying a gun can be dangerous business," she rejoins that "building a skyscraper" can be dangerous business, too, thus demonstrating that she's missed his point entirely-by and large this movie is marginally competent. I wouldn't make such a point out of this except that Ed Wood's "badness" is the key component of his continued notoriety; I guess I'm suggesting that anyone who's seen a movie as wretched as Paranoia or Blood Sisters (to name two of about four billion examples) should be unimpressed by Wood's supposed ineptitude.

The movie is most interesting when it's suggesting that our free wills and capacity to make decisions abandon us in the face of relatively banal stimuli-in this case, the condition of holding a gun in his hand is enough to make Don take leave of his senses and start shooting everyone in sight. Several times he insists that "I never thought it would come to this," just as the dope smokers of Reefer Madness seem to watch on helplessly as their own lives go up in bubbly, gurgling lung-smoke just because they couldn't see the long-term peril in a puff of marijuana. Doctor Gregor provides the obligatory Freudian theory for Don's miscreantism-turns out Dad spoiled Don as a child and the little fellow also suffered from an absent mother, "God rest her soul"-but this is largely an afterthought. The more Doctor Gregor and Marilyn sacrifice themselves for Don, the more we realize his upbringing was just fine; he simply can't think straight when he has a pistol in his hand. When Doc and Marilyn are preparing to meet with Vic for the first time the movie seems to consider pursuing this idea seriously-Marilyn, wanting only to protect Don, drops another in an apparently interminable supply of handguns into her purse-but once there the gun never resurfaces so the movie never makes good on its promise to transform Marilyn into a murderous fiend once she decides to pack heat.

Don't be fooled by the tagline-underage girls are not the "jail bait" of this movie's title. Guns are. Guns. Get it?

In "Jail Bait", Ed Wood applies his boundless enthusiasm and limited talent to the crime movie genre. From a technical viewpoint, it's actually one of his less unsound features, although that cuts down somewhat on the unintentional laughs that it provides. The story is actually pretty solid, and could have served as the basis for a pretty good film-noir. Most of its weaknesses are in the acting, pacing, and dialogue, plus the occasional zany out-of-place detail.

The story uses a basically familiar setup, but adds a couple of extra components to it. Lyle Talbot and Steve Reeves play a pair of policemen investigating the misdeeds of a young man whose father is a highly respected doctor. The doctor and his daughter, meanwhile, try to protect the son both from the police and from the career criminal who has led him astray. For the most part, the story is conventional but believable, with a rather clever ending.

Most of the rest of the production does not come up to the level of the story. The ever-loyal Talbot gives his typically earnest performance, trying to make the dialogue sound as good as possible, while enduring some amusingly awkward interactions with the stilted Reeves. The rest of the cast is generally nondescript, and sometimes noticeably out of their depth.

The dialogue contains some of the expected unintentional laughs, and the characters often overexert themselves on unnecessary exposition or on pointing out details that were already completely obvious. The pacing, likewise, is inconsistent from scene to scene, although with fewer of the kinds of direction and editing slip-ups that generally characterize Wood's features.

No one could ever deny that Wood loved making movies, and he made sincere efforts to make them as well as he could, which is what has kept his movies so watchable despite their shortcomings. "Jail Bait" attempts to emulate the classics of its genre, but it is severely limited by the lack of talent and other resources.

First of all, let me say that the title Jail Bait has to do with a gun and not under-age sex. This is one of Ed Wood's classics. Yes, it's horrible and the movie is so cheap it's funny. However, it's not as "good" as Plan 9.

Things to watch for:

The doctor's office. His desk is huge. When ever anyone wants to sit down, the have to squeeze between a plant and chair.

The music - it's horrible and ALWAYS playing. Even when someones parking a car the suspenseful guitar music begins strumming.

The doc performs plastic surgery in a guys living room! On his couch! At gun point!

Steve Reeves first movie - he takes his shirt off to prove it's him.

Worth the rental. The scenes in the theater (with the exception of a horrible and really kind of shocking black-face act thrown in for no reason at all) made me laugh out loud.

How could you not like Ed Wood? Here was a man who loved film making for which he had absolutely no talent. He never gave up, he scrounged around for money and locations, used actors with no ability or who were desperate for work, and is treasured by all bad-movie buffs. He would probably be thrilled that his name is universally recognized albeit as the worst director of all times.

He does his magic again with "Jail Bait", an inept film to say the least. All that needs to be said about the acting, dialog, sets, and the annoying music has already been covered on these boards, so I won't repeat it. I'll just say that I wonder how Lyle Talbot, who had a pretty decent career in films in the 1930s and early 40s, ever sank to this level. He was a face that appeared all over moviedom for years and was a good actor in support of some of the big stars of the day. Times must have been very, very hard for him to stoop to this. We know why Bela Lugosi worked with Wood but maybe Talbot did it on a bet.....or not. It's always sad to see competent actors who once had careers, end up in this manner.

If you have never seen an Ed Wood film, put this one on your "must see list"..........really all of his films are "must sees" if you are a fan of "so bad that they are good" movies. Ed Wood, I salute you!!!!!!