Jail Bait (1954)
Oh Ed Wood! How do we love thee?
Before you get hot and bothered about the title of this little opus from schlockmeister Ed Wood (Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space), let me just set the record straight. Jail Bait does not refer to a hot-to-trot underage bad girl. No sir. The jail bait in question is actually...a gun. Jail Bait is the story of how guns get an ordinarily nice guy into bad, bad trouble.
Now, let me just say right off the bat that Jail Bait is not the film for those looking for quality filmmaking, but, it's also not for those who love the real schlock from Ed Wood, either. This particular film has some things that none of Wood's other films have: an actually comprehensible plot, a narrative flow, and a Twilight Zone type trick ending. The acting, dialogue and sets are just as bad as they ever were, but overall it's just not as bad as it could've, or maybe should've, been.
Clancy Moore plays the son of a plastic surgeon who, as the film opens, is being bailed out of jail for possession of an unregistered firearm by his sister, the ever awful Delores Fuller of Glen or Glenda fame. She is introduced to the two cops in charge of the case (played by Lyle Talbot and a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves), her response "I hope I'm happy to know you" is bad enough as it is, but she says it with the inflection of a question, making one ponder the depths of its meaning.
Once Fuller gets Moore home (I guess they live together), he immediately finds another gun and goes to meet the local crime boss, Timothy Farrell. He and Don go to rob a local movie theatre, which goes awry, and ends up killing the nightwatchman and shooting another woman.
Oh, I almost forgot, after Moore takes the gun, and before he and Farrell rob the theatre, Director Wood, for some reason, cuts to a striptease that has nothing to do with anything. According to the background information, this strip footage was actually restored from the original cut which was censored out. Why it was restored is anybody's guess. I figure Wood realized his film was pure crapola and that a little T&A was necessary to secure an audience; also, the striptease footage was replaced by an "uninspired blackface number." The mind reels at what that could possibly have been.
Anyway, to protect himself from arrest, Farrell shoots and kills Moore, and then calls Moore's surgeon father and blackmails him into giving him a new face. Before the operation (on Farrell's living room couch), the doctor finds Moore's body. Weeks later, Farrell arrives at the doctor's house to get the bandages removed and the police arrive and see that Farrell now has Moore's face. Since the woman shot in the holdup fingers Farrell-as-Moore to be the actual shooter, he goes to prison, for Moore's crimes.
Clever, no? However, the sheer lack of competence in almost every other department sinks it. For an Ed Wood movie, what else was to be expected? The music is atrocious-a bizarre Mexican mariachi guitar score. All of the acting is deplorable, it's hard to say who gives the worst performance, it might be Fuller, but since her part is small, the winner is Herbert Rawlinson as the doctor. He's given the worst dialogue of all: "I reconstructed a guy's face tonight and it was strenuous and very, very complicated. Plastic surgery, at times, seems to me to be very, very complicated", or when allowing Moore to escape to protect him from the police: "Out the back door and into the alley. The Doctors of the night will hide you." Doctors of the night???? There's so much more: a reel countdown is left unedited, the decor is so slight and tacky that one of the biggest laughs comes from Fuller who calls Farrell a "cheap crook" only to have his girlfriend, Theodora Thurman, utter "Ha! Cheap? Just look at this place. He is anything but cheap."
If you are looking for total Glen or Glenda type incompetence, look elsewhere. Jail Bait is bad, but it just might be Ed Wood's best. Which would still make it anyone else's worst.
