09.24.09 | Dr. Strangefilm | From The Files Of Dr. Strangefilm...Print this Post
Edward D. Wood, Jr. Ah, dear Ed. Where would we mavens of movie mediocrity be without the works of our favorite angora-fetishist filmmaker to dissect and ridicule? Everyone from the Medved brothers to Tim Burton to the Best Brains at Mystery Science Theatre 3000 have had their say on Wood's rather unique ouevre.
Most times, however, the focus has been on his egregious entries in the horror (Bride of the Monster), science-fiction (Plan 9 from Outer Space) and...er, autobiographical (Glen or Glenda) genres. Sure, Ed may have been out of his depths there, but what if the cross-dressing director tried his hand at crime drama, with a gritty, noir-flavored thriller featuring just a touch of "Dragnet's" police procedural technique? Well, it so happens that Wood did just that in 1954 with a little ditty called Jail Bait, and it turned out every bit as amateurish as his more talked-about turkeys.
First of all, the title does not refer to the sort of decoys that Chris Hansen uses to catch predators on Dateline NBC, but to the gun that small-time hood Don Gregor (Clancy Malone) takes from the home of his renowned plastic surgeon father (Herbert Rawlinson). Don was already in trouble with the law for packin' heat, you see, and his devoted sister Marilyn (Wood paramour Dolores Fuller) had to bail him out of custody. "Don't you know that gun is jail bait?," Marilyn pleads to her embittered sibling.
Ignoring sis's advice, Don meets up with hoodlum pal Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) and is talked into joining him in a payroll heist at a vaudeville theatre (guess they still had them in '54). The movie magically transports us to said theatre, where we are treated to, of all things...a blackface minstrel show routine! This tacky--even by early '50s standards--sequence was copied-and-pasted from the 1951 Ron Ormond oddity and future case file Yes Sir, Mr. Bones. To be sure, Wood's company was nothing if not economical. Jail Bait's out-of-place, non-stop Spanish guitar soundtrack, courtesy of future Hanna-Barbera theme writer Hoyt Curtin, was similarly borrowed from Ormond's Mesa of Lost Women.
Well, the robbery hits a snafu and Don winds up fatally shooting the theatre guard, while Vic merely wounds a witness who identifies both crooks to the cops. A repentant Don goes to his father and confesses, vowing to turn himself in, but is bumped off by Brady before he can do so. With the heat on him, Vic goes to Dr. Gregor and pretends that he's holding Don hostage, blackmailing the doc to operate on his face (in his living room, no less!) so he can escape. I'm not going to spoil the startling twist ending, save to say it's so implausible that the EC crime comics of the era wouldn't have used it.
Jail Bait would be just another uninteresting, B-type thriller were it not for such distinctive Ed Wood touches as threadbare set design, labyrinthine dialogue ("Why, sister, that's very sisterly of you," "This afternoon we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day"), and a female character's angora hat. Along with Farrell and Fuller, the cast also includes Wood regulars Lyle Talbot, Mona McKinnon and Conrad Brooks, as well as future screen Hercules Steve Reeves, in his film debut, as a cop who manages to appear shirtless for several minutes while chatting with his partner. It all adds up to mid-level movie strangeness, but one can only imagine what might have been if Ed had managed to get his pal Bela Lugosi to play the doctor as originally intended (Morbid side note: Rawlinson died the day after his final scene was filmed).
Have you ever seen SINISTER URGE?