Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 254: Is 'Jail Bait' (1954) film noir?

A moody moment from Ed Wood's semi-obscure crime thriller Jail Bait.

"It has always been easier to recognize a film noir than to define the term."

-James Naremore, film scholar

If you look up Edward D. Wood, Jr. on the Internet Movie Database (as I have done many hundreds of times while writing this column) and sort his credits by genre, you'll see that only two of his films have been designated "film noir" by the site's users: Jail Bait (1954) and The Violent Years (1956). I'd have thought The Sinister Urge (1960) would qualify, too, but currently that one is designated simply a drama. Not moody enough, I suppose. Or maybe no one thought to label it as such.

Noir namer Nino Frank.

Whatever the case, we have just lived through another November or, as film writer Marya E. Gates has famously dubbed it, Noirvember. This is the time each year when cinephiles are encouraged to study and appreciate film noir (literally "dark film"), a genre first named by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946. Appropriately, in keeping with the gloomy spirit of the season, Mike White's podcast The Projection Booth just did four noir-themed episodes last month, and YouTuber James Rolfe posted a thoughtful 23-minute video essay called "Why I Love Film Noir" to his Cinemassacre channel. 

All of this material has been buzzing around in my brain recently, and I started to think about how Ed Wood fits into this whole picture. That's my curse. I have to apply everything to Eddie's career. It's become the prism through which I see the world. He's not thought of as a "noir director," but certainly these movies had an effect on him. It's a topic worth exploring. Should I have done this article back in November? Yes. But I had other articles I was working on at the time, so this one had to wait. I'm getting to it now. We'll call it Noircember, okay?

Since Ed Wood did not direct The Violent Years himself -- those duties were handled by one-and-done director William Morgan -- I am concentrating my attention on Jail Bait, Eddie's oft-overlooked sophomore feature. As I've said before, it remains the neglected middle child of his 1950s films, likely because it does not feature flying saucers, graveyards, or men in angora sweaters. Criswell, Bela Lugosi, and Tor Johnson are AWOL as well. (Since Bela was busy with his Vegas revue, his part was given to the wheezing Herbert Rawlinson.) Even though Eddie made this bleak crime thriller between Glen or Glenda (1953) and Bride of the Monster (1955), the biopic Ed Wood (1994) skips right over it, as if it never existed. Well, it did and does. But is it film noir?