A complicated noir-melodrama about a morose, murderous kind of guy (Lawrence Tierney) who marries an insecure woman for her money but can't keep his thoughts off her sister (Claire Trevor). The feeling is mutual. One of Wise's most admired noirs, Born to Kill found a place in critic Manny Farber's book Negative Space, among the "Underground Films": "The terrorizing of a dowdy, middle-aged, frog-faced woman that starts in a decrepit hotel and ends in a bumbling, screeching, crawling murder at midnight on the shore. For his big shock effect, director Robert Wise...uses the angle going down to the water to create a middle-class mediocrity that out-horrors anything Graham Greene attempted in his early books on small-time gunsels." And Andrew Sarris called the film "a revelation...the most Nietzschean of all American film noir. The unyieldingly malevolent character played by Lawrence Tierney makes no sense except as a projection of Claire Trevor's evil desires."