A complicated, grim (even for noir) melodrama about a morose and murderous kind of guy (Lawrence Tierney) who marries an insecure woman for her money but can't stay away from her sister (Claire Trevor), Born to Kill "is an excellent example of an RKO style, not only for its visuals but also for its offhanded depiction of perturbed sexuality and extreme brutality" (Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference...). In his essay "Underground Films," on noirs and action films, Manny Farber writes of their idiosyncratic use of locations, citing the climax of Born to Kill: "...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."