JAIL BAIT (1954)

By Gary Deane

“There is nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.”  Vladimir Nabokov

Once upon a time, Friday night wasn’t Friday night on college campuses without a screening of one or both of Ed Wood’s famously bad Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956) or Glen or Glenda (1953), a demented cult classic that baffles to this day. The latter is notable for its groundbreaking if unhinged portrayal of LGBTQ issues (Wood himself was an enthusiastic cross-dresser, with a particular fondness for angora).  

Wood’s story is well-known (if not entirely understood),  thanks to Plan 9’s epic exposure on late-night television beginning in 1961, followed by its citing as ‘The Worst Film Ever Made’ in Michael Medved’s best-selling book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980). Wood had become an object of cult fascination himself, an obsession fed by the release of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), one of The Best Films Ever Made Not to Receive an Oscar Nomination.  

In 1947, Wood came to Hollywood and began writing scripts and directing commercials and TV pilots along with several micro-budget westerns.  Glenda or Glenda was Wood’s first feature and it was a miracle that he ever got to direct another one.  However, two years later Wood teamed up with Alex Gordon, a writer from the UK and they set to work on a grungy little crime drama, Jail Bait. Gordon, who would go on to co-found American International Pictures, provided Jail Bait a semi-coherent storyline and some narrative flow, something to which few other Ed Wood films can lay claim. 

Jail Bait opens with Don Gregor (Clancy Moore), the wayward son of a world-famous plastic surgeon getting bailed out of jail by his sister, Marilyn (Dolores Fuller), for possession of an unregistered firearm. Keeping an eye out are the two cops in charge of the case, played by Lyle Talbot and a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves in his first shot at stardom. The pair knows that Gregor's fallen in with a low-rent gangster, Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) who together have pulled off a couple of small-time heists.

  

When Don gets home, he grabs another gun and goes out to meet Vic. They go off to rob a movie theater, but not before the action cuts to a striptease show (in some expurgated versions of the film, it’s a blackface minstrel show), which has nothing to with anything. Later the robbery goes awry when Don panics and all hell breaks loose. Vic subsequently kills Don and forces Don’s father, a surgeon, into giving him a new face. However, the good doctor discovers his son's body at Vic’s apartment and makes plans to take his revenge.

Doctor Gregor is played by Herbert Rawlinson, a former silent-era leading man who scratched out a living afterward by taking any roles he could get, most of them uncredited.  It’s hard to say who gives the worst performance in Jail Bait but the winner might be Rawlinson, who has the lion’s share of bad dialog in a film that revels in it. As he says after a hard day at the office, “You know, I had to perform a very difficult operation this morning…and it was very strenuous and complicated. Plastic surgery seems to me at times to be very, very, complicated.” And, "This afternoon we had a long telephone conversation earlier in the day”. Maybe it was just as well that Rawlinson died the night after shooting his last scene in the movie. All this and sets and décor so impoverished and tacky that one of the biggest laughs comes when Fuller calls Brady a "cheap crook", only to have his girlfriend, Loretta (Theodora Thurman exclaim, “Cheap? Just look at the place! Vic is anything but cheap!” 

     

Given that the film's budget was only $21,000 for a 4-day shoot, Wood did well by it and there’s arguably something more to the production than might meet the uncommitted eye. Jail Bait is the closest Wood ever came to making a legitimate movie and entering the Hollywood mainstream. Though he was out of his depth as a director, especially with actors, the movie manages to be more enjoyable than a lot of the run-of-the-mill crime dramas and B noirs of the day far less suspenseful. Jail Bait’s wacko plot and daft dialog are all just part of the movie’s aberrant charm. It’s so consumed with its own internal logic and so thickly riddled with clichés that they almost stop being clichés and the movie takes on a strange, otherworldly sense of its own (Or almost of its own. Looking to cut corners, Wood used the same dream-like flamenco-guitar score as he did in Mesa of Lost Women, 1953).  

A big chunk of Jail Bait’s perverse allure can be credited to Timothy Farrell, an actor with mustachioed good looks, an authoritative baritone, and a smarmy, suspect manner. Farrell actually was purpose-built for film noir and played the lead in half a dozen crime titles involving Wood. The problem for Farrell was that he wasn’t that much of an actor and Wood was just about the only one who would hire him. But no matter how chintzy the production, incongruous the story, or cheap the patter, Farrell managed at least to give a conscientious performance, one often at sizeable odds with material. Maybe he just had ambitions at sizeable odds with reality. 

Farrell, born Timothy Sperl, grew up in Los Angeles and after serving in the Army Air Corps in WWII, got a job as a bailiff with the Los Angeles Marshal’s Office. Around the same time he started getting bit parts in low-rent B titles. The first was Test Tube Babies (1948) in which he plays a sympathetic doctor who counsels a young couple that there’s no shame or scandal in test tube fertilization and artificial insemination. Of course, the information is sandwiched between plenty of nudity, some wild parties, and cat fight.

Farrell’s bedside manner won him a similar part in Hometown Girl (1949) another ‘sex hygiene’ film that dealt with unwed motherhood. Both films had been produced by schlockmeister George Weiss who then cast Farrell as a scumbag gymnasium owner and drug pusher in a trio of crude quickies, The Devil’s Sleep (1949), Racket Girls (1951), and Dance Hall Racket (1953). The first of them was mostly an excuse to showcase endless lengths of female-wrestling and cat-fighting footage, the last a cheesy curio written by and co-starring stand-up social satirist and fall-down substance abuser Lenny Bruce who died of a morphine overdose at age 40.  

Shortly after, Farrell appeared in another seedy Weiss-produced title Paris after Midnight (1951) which boasted famous stripper, Tempest Storm. During production, Farrell along with everyone else on the set was busted in a highly-publicized vice-raid, never a good thing to happen to a sworn peace officer.

However, none of it seemed to stick and in 1954 life met art when his legal and theatrical careers dove-tailed in the George Cukor film, A Star is Born in which he was cast as an officer of the court. It happened again when Farrell secured a regular part as court bailiff in a late ‘50s television series, Accused, featuring, among others, Robert Culp and Pamela Mason.  

    

Farrell’s screen career ended in 1957. Meantime, he’d managed to hold on to his job in the Los Angeles County Marshall’s Office and rose through the ranks and was appointed County Marshall in 1975. He was fired four years later, following his conviction on corruption charges. 

The legacy of Ed Wood lives on with events such as the University of Southern California’s annual ‘Ed Wood Film Festival’ at which students are charged with writing, filming, and editing an Ed Wood-esque short film based on a predetermined theme. His movies were spoofed on the much-loved Mystery Theater 3000 and several remade as pornographic features. Many of his bizarre transvestite-themed sex novels have been republished.

Wood also established a theme with Jail Bait that he would return to several times: that weak-willed parenting can lead to disaster. This was hinted in Glen or Glenda, then given full-throat in Jail Bait and The Violent Years (1956), a juvenile delinquency yarn in which a rich and spoiled girl with indulgent parents forms a vicious girl gang with a penchant for robbing gas stations. It's just what happens. 

Gary Deane