JAILBAIT a/k/a HIDDEN FACE [1954]

This was director Ed Wood's attempt at film noir--or as I call it, “film noyer.” Wood also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay (with Alex Gordon). The cast includes Steve “Hercules” Reeves and Wood mainstays Lyle Talbot, Dolores Fuller, and Timothy Farrell. The opening scene features a police car with nothing written on the doors, front or rear. It also magically changes from a Nash Rambler to a Ford in the space of a jump cut. Factor in the repetitive, mariachi-styled film score, and I knew I was in for one Edwoodian good time!

Career criminal Vic Brady [Farrell] draws young Don Gregor [Clancy Malone] into a life of crime. When their attempted robbery results in the shooting death of a security guard, Brady blackmails Gregor's father [Herbert Rawlinson], a plastic surgeon, into altering his face to fool the cops. The film never explains why the cops wouldn't recognize Brady some other way, like his voice or his fingerprints.

The first thing to grab my attention was Dolores Fuller's non-acting. Her previous stints in Wood's “Glen Or Glenda?” and “Bride of the Monster” taught Fuller nothing about how to be an actress. She either recites her dialogue in a monotone or simulates anger by shrilly caterwauling. Fuller must have known she couldn't act and only did these films as a favor to boyfriend Wood. The rest of the cast is not inherently better, but one could hardly expect more from a cast forced to deliver lines like, “You hit the solution right on the head,” and “This afternoon, we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day.”

Other items of note: shooting victims who don't bleed, rooms separated by curtains and not doors, one hilariously tiny desk, plastic surgery performed on somebody's couch--at gunpoint, no less--and a scar that mysteriously shifts from being vertical to horizontal.

But the worst thing about JAILBAIT is a loathsome blackface routine that must have seemed racist even by early '50s standards. It has nothing to do with the story and was only included to pad things out. Later prints of JAILBAIT replaced the blackface routine with a striptease. Alas, my copy did not.