Born to be Bad

There are films that survive because they are masterpieces; films that endure because they feature stars who would subsequently acquire the lustre of legend; and then there are films that remain worth revisiting because they offer us an unusually vivid glimpse of a Hollywood that was already beginning to recede into history. Lowell Sherman’s Born to Be Bad (1934) belongs principally to the third category. Starring a remarkably young Loretta Young and an almost improbably youthful Cary Grant, the film is an uneven yet undeniably fascinating melodrama about sexual independence, motherhood, poverty, class, manipulation and morality.

At its centre stands Letty Strong, played by Loretta Young, an unmarried mother who has learnt the harsh arithmetic of survival through charm, beauty, sexual manipulation and sheer force of character. Letty is emphatically not a conventionally respectable heroine. She is morally ambiguous, calculating and, at times, downright dishonest. Yet what makes her compelling is that the film does not immediately invite us to condemn her merely because she transgresses the accepted codes of feminine respectability.

Letty is, above all, a woman who has been compelled to become self-reliant. She has a young son, Mickey, and is fiercely determined to protect him and provide for him. Her methods may be morally dubious, but the instinct that animates them is unmistakably one of survival. That distinction is crucial, for it transforms what might otherwise have been a conventional portrait of a scheming woman into something considerably more complicated.

The principal reason to watch Born to Be Bad, however, is Loretta Young. She is sensual, cynical, aggressive, occasionally selfish and almost entirely uninterested in soliciting the audience’s approval. And therein lies the fascination of the performance. Young does not attempt to prettify Letty or furnish her with the conventional consolations of screen virtue. Instead, she inhabits the character’s contradictions with remarkable assurance.

For Letty is capable of manipulating almost everyone around her, yet her relationship with her son possesses an unmistakable authenticity. She may be a profoundly questionable influence on Mickey, but she plainly loves him. This paradox prevents her from becoming merely another femme fatale. She does not manipulate men simply because she takes pleasure in domination. Rather, she has fashioned an entire philosophy of existence around the conviction that vulnerability is weakness and that survival belongs to those prepared to exploit circumstances before circumstances exploit them.

Her credo might almost be reduced to a single, rather brutal proposition: if the world intends to exploit you, learn to exploit it first. Young communicates this philosophy with an almost effortless amalgam of confidence, sensuality and defensive hardness.

Then there is Cary Grant, playing Malcolm Trevor, a wealthy businessman whose truck accidentally injures Letty’s son. Letty immediately perceives an opportunity to extract money from the situation and proceeds to deploy increasingly elaborate stratagems to exploit it. Malcolm is wealthy, respectable and fundamentally decent, but he is also curiously passive and remarkably vulnerable to Letty’s machinations. 

The narrative begins with the collision between Malcolm’s truck and Mickey. Letty exaggerates the extent of her son’s injuries in an attempt to secure compensation. When her deception is uncovered, she loses custody of Mickey, who is eventually taken into the home of Malcolm and his wife, Alyce. Letty then determines that the only means of reclaiming her son is to manipulate Malcolm emotionally. With the assistance of her lawyer, she sets about seducing him, intending ultimately to weaponise evidence of their relationship against him.

What might have been a conventional tale of marital jealousy acquires a rather more intriguing dimension through Marion Burns’s portrayal of Alyce, Malcolm’s wife. Alyce is not the possessive, suspicious or vindictive spouse that melodramatic convention might lead us to anticipate. Instead, she is extraordinarily accommodating and self-sacrificing. Her marriage to Malcolm is portrayed as emotionally incomplete, particularly in the absence of children, and her response to Letty’s intrusion is strikingly unconventional. She becomes less an antagonist than another casualty of the emotional arrangements into which the other characters have stumbled.

Lowell Sherman, who had enjoyed careers both as an actor and director, had already established himself in the Hollywood of the early 1930s. Born to Be Bad was among his final films; he died in December 1934, only months after its release. His direction is not especially flamboyant, but he understands the most important asset at his disposal: Loretta Young. The camera favours her, the narrative gravitates towards her, and, most significantly, the moral architecture of the film is repeatedly destabilised by her presence.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is the relationship between Letty and Mickey. Letty has transmitted her own philosophy of survival to her son. She does not teach him the consolations of conventional morality; she teaches him to fight, deceive and recognise opportunities for what they are. From one perspective, this makes her a deeply irresponsible mother. From another, it represents the desperate survival ethic of someone who has concluded that conventional morality has never offered her protection.

And therein lies what could have been the true heart of Born to Be Bad: the uneasy distinction between immorality and survival, between selfishness and self-preservation, and between being a bad mother and attempting, however misguidedly, to prepare one’s child for the world as one has experienced it.

The film does not always exploit these possibilities to their fullest. Its melodramatic machinery can be conspicuously uneven, and some of its psychological developments feel more convenient than convincing. Yet there is considerably more going on here than the title might suggest. Born to Be Bad is not merely a morality tale about a manipulative woman; it is an artefact of a Hollywood negotiating the boundaries of female sexuality, respectability, motherhood and social class.

Above all, however, the film belongs to Loretta Young. She gives it its pulse, its sensuality and, most importantly, its moral ambiguity. Long before the characters around her have decided whether Letty is victim or villain, Young ensures that we are unable to make so comfortable a distinction.

Born to Be Bad may not be a masterpiece, but it is an intriguing cinematic time capsule — and one rendered considerably more valuable by the presence of a magnetic Loretta Young and an early, fascinating Cary Grant.

Worth watching for: Loretta Young’s remarkably assured performance, the film’s surprisingly ambiguous treatment of female morality, and the opportunity to see Cary Grant before he became Cary Grant.