Born to Kill (released in the U.K. as Lady of Deceit and in Australia as Deadlier Than the Male) is a 1947 RKO Pictures American film noir starring Lawrence Tierney, Claire Trevor and Walter Slezak with Esther Howard, Elisha Cook Jr., and Audrey Long in supporting roles.

[1] San Francisco socialite Helen Brent has established residence in Reno, Nevada to obtain a divorce decree and is lodging in a boarding house owned by the feisty Mrs. Kraft.

Helen meets Laury Palmer, a next-door neighbor, and Mrs. Kraft's best friend, who confides that she has accepted a date with a man named Danny to incite jealousy in her new beau, Sam Wilde.

[2][3] By April the studio had replaced Fisher and enlisted screenwriters Eve Greene and Richard Macaulay to compose the script as a team and to manage it through production.

[4][5] Casting began in August 1945 and Lawrence Tierney was RKO's first choice following his powerful performance in Dillinger, released four months earlier.

This female subjectivity enables a more nuanced view of the femme fatale, a central motif in film noir, rather than that which is typical of the genre.

Although the archetypical film noir femme fatale's sexuality is often merely a tool to manipulate men for material gain, Helen is a more complicated figure.

[15][16] Tierney's frequent off-screen troubles also attracted greater scrutiny of his films by state review boards and local censors, some of which sought to ban Born to Kill in their communities.

Schary vowed to lessen the "arbitrary use of violence" in RKO films[23] and pledged that the studio would no longer produce "gangster pictures" such as Born to Kill.

[26][27] At a meeting of its board of directors on December 3, 1947, the MPAA voted to bar 14 "'objectionable and unsuitable'" films released between 1928 and 1947 from theatrical reissue, including Born to Kill.

"[26] In 1948, 12-year-old Howard Lang was convicted for using a switchblade and a piece of concrete to kill a seven-year-old boy outside Chicago the previous year.

[29] Lang's lawyers argued that he had watched Born to Kill less than three weeks prior to the homicide[30] and that the film's violence triggered a form of temporary insanity.

[32] He was then acquitted following a retrial, but the judge recommended laws to censor violent films and hold theater managers liable for exhibiting them.

[35]Irving Kaplan of Motion Picture Daily found "weaknesses in several departments" of "the heavy-handed melodrama"[21] although he focused his attention on the performances of the "tough and ruthless" Tierney and the "captivating and calculating" Trevor: The picture itself is one of those affairs which winds up with five corpses ... Portrayals generally betray a tendency toward over-acting and grotesque emphasis, perhaps to achieve over-all melodrama, while the dialogue, in spots, appears forced and weighted with flourishes.

[21]The Film Daily cautioned theater owners about the "homicidal drama," describing it as "a sexy, suggestive yarn of crime with punishment, strictly for the adult trade.

He's outstanding as one of the most violently disturbed psychos in all of film noir, giving even Robert Ryan in Crossfire a run for his money.

Wise swims in the genre's amorality, scoring a kitchen brawl to big-band radio tunes, terrorizing a soused matron at a nocturnal beach skirmish, and leaving the last word to Walter Slezak's jovially corrupt detective.

[40]Director Guillermo del Toro has credited Born to Kill as a primary influence on his 2021 film Nightmare Alley, noting that "a couple of the murders in the movie are shocking, even in 2022.