RE/SEARCH Incredibly Strange Films: Jail Bait (1954)

Also known as Hidden Face, this Ed Wood movie is about Don Gregor (Clancy Malone, director Ed Wood’s grocery delivery person), the rich son of plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor (Herbert Rawlinson). Instead of following his father into medicine, he’s a henchman of gangster Vic Brady (Timothy Farrell) and constantly getting into trouble with the law. A job gone wrong ends with them killing an old woman and Don telling his father that he wants to turn himself in to the police. Vic doesn’t allow that to happen, killing him and forcing Dr. Gregor to perform plastic surgery so that he can stay ahead of the police.

I’ve made this sound like a normal movie but no, it’s always night no matter what and the soundtrack from Mesa of Lost Women plays constantly over everything, never stopping. You may think that Rawlinson’s part should be played by Bela Lugosi. In a similar tragedy to that actor, Rawlinson died the day after filming was done. You may notice he isn’t breathing well. He had terminal lung cancer.

The nightclub scene is unique in every print. Wood had intended it to be a striptease scene, but the producers replaced it with a performance by minstrel act Cotton Watts, one of the last performers in the genre. This is taken from another movie, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones.

This is also the first movie for Steve Reeves and other than Athena, the only film in which his real voice is heard.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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