While exploring the content on some of the Roku streaming channels dedicated to Film Noir  I discovered what is possibly the worst Noir ever produced, Jail Bait  directed by what many consider to be the worst director of all time, the auteur responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Edward Wood Jr. Full spoilers follow.

Jail Bait(1954) has the elements of a film noir but like mayonnaise left in the summer sun it has gone quit bad. Don Gregor is the son of a wealthy, world-famous, Plastic Surgeon (This will be important later, putting Ed Wood ahead of Benioff and Weiss in understanding Chekov’s Gun.)  but Don, for *reasons* likes to carry pistols and hang around cheap hoodlums. At the movie’s opening Don’s sister Marilyn, played by Ed Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, bails Don out of jail after the police arrest him for carrying a revolver. After getting home and wasting time with stilted exposition laden dialog Don quickly takes his father pistol from its hiding space inside a book and leaves to hang out with his hoodlum friend, Vic Brady. Vic drags Don into a robbery of a theater that of course goes badly and end up with a retired cop dead and a woman shot. But it did net them 23,000 dollars which is over 200,000 dollars adjusted for inflation, so that theater must have been showing Avengers: Endgame. Within hours the radio’s exposition specific station is now broadcasting the news of the robbery, along with Don’s and Vic’s names and identities, here is where we learn that Don’s father is a ‘world famous’ plastic surgeon, but the reports even positively identify Don as the gun man who murdered the retired cop. Don goes back to his father, confesses to the crime and Dr. Gregor extracts a promise from Don to turn himself over to the police later, it has to be later for *reasons*. The police arrive and Don scoots out the back way. The police seem to know everything except the location of the back door but because Dr. Gregor is such a great upstanding citizen they don’t press him on anything. By the way the junior police lieutenant is played by legendary muscle man Steve Reeves but I doubt this is the movie Frank-N-Furter had in mind when he suggested an ‘old Steve Reeves movie’ in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Any who Vic nabs Don coming out of Dr. Gregor’s officer and forces him back to Vic’s hideout where Vic’s girl Loretta is waiting. There more tedious dialog and to shut him up Vic kills Don. To escape the law, Vic decides that he needs a new face because apparently only the face is used to identify people as fingerprints an apparently lost tech in this alternate 1954.  Threatening to kill Don, who is of course already dead, Vic forces Dr. Gregor is perform surgery and give him a new face. Ed Wood apparently could not afford a hospital set in his budget, nor an operating room staff, so the doctor performs this major reconstructive surgery assisted by his daughter and with Vic chloroformed on a living room sofa. Now before the doctor could perform this living room plastic surgery he needed a basin of hot water, apparently facial reconstruction and delivering babies have the same equipment requirements, and while searching for a basin in Vic’s kitchen he discovers Don’s *standing* dead body. Dr. Gregor completes the surgery and advises Loretta that Vic must come to him in weeks when the healing will be complete. The two weeks pass and the police are baffled how two people can just vanish as they have found neither Vic nor Don and that just seems impossible. They get a call from Dr. Gregor and leave to get to his house. Vic and Loretta get the doctor’s house and before the bandages are removed the police bust in. Vic is smug and confident that he’s in no danger, assuring the police he is not the man that they are searching for. The bandages come off and Vic is revealed to have Don’s face. The police go to arrest ‘Don’ and there’s a gun fight which ends with Vic/Don dead face down in the house’s pool, a vision shameless stolen, poorly from Sunset Boulevard.

For those of you who have seen Ed Wood’s magnum opus Plan 9 From Outer Space you may have considered that the man had little talent as a filmmaker but I assure you that Ed’s skills had matured by the time he produced, wrote, and directed Plan 9. Jail Bait,and despite the poster the title has nothing to do with the women of the film, in addition to a most laughable surgical scene posses the dullest car chase ever committed to celluloid. Many noirs  have a nightclub scenes where the romantic interest of the protagonist performs some sultry song and while Jail Bait  has a night club scene in the middle of the movie it involves none of the characters, has no torch singer in a slinky dress but instead presents that most offensive of all club acts an honest to god white man in blackface minstrel show. So this move is not just bad, it’s deeply racist and has been, until the advent of streaming and YouTube, justifiably forgotten.