alr

Born to Be Bad

Screening on Film
Directed by Nicholas Ray.
With Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott.
US, 1950, 35mm, black & white, 94 min.

From its opening scenes, which clearly display Ray’s masterful use of interior space to reveal the emotional state of the characters who inhabit them, Born to Be Bad upends our expectations by depicting one of cinema’s perennial “good girls” as the ultimate villain and, more importantly, pitting her against a morally vacuous society that just might deserve whatever she can dish out. As the scheming seductress who manipulates her way to the top of San Francisco’s social scene, Ray brilliantly subverts Joan Fontaine’s screen persona as a “nice” girl, revealing the cold-hearted calculation and deviousness behind her simpering smiles. Nicholas Musuraca’s glossy black and white cinematography artfully depicts their glittering world as shallow and empty.
 

Part of film series

Read more

Nicholas Ray. Hollywood's Last Romantic

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait