[6]

Cary Grant and Loretta Young star in this pre-Code drama about a devious mother and her young son who feign injury to fleece a wealthy businessman after a minor car accident. Hollywood is known for neat and tidy little narratives, but if you dig into the years before the Hayes Code took effect, you can find some offbeat gems. You certainly wouldn’t see a movie about a tramp and her hooligan son after the Code took effect. And neither would you see the businessman (Grant) so eagerly dump his wife in trade for the tramp! Perplexing? It was for me. But the element of surprise goes a long way, and Born to Be Bad was anything but predictable. And how refreshing is it to have complex, flawed characters all around? Grant is pretty dry and dull in this early performance, but Young carries the movie while Jackie Kelk is respectable in the son role.