The shadowy dark side of Eisenhower's America is revealed in all its stiffly acted menace in Ed Wood's 1954 exposé Jail Bait, the tale of a bad seed immersed in that most horrific of crimes, unregistered gun ownership. As the film opens, Clancy Malone is being sprung from jail, where he was sent for carrying an unregistered firearm. Alas, it takes more than just $1,000 bail and some jail time to wean the gun-crazy Malone from his unregistered ways. Not long after arriving home, he's pulling yet another unregistered gun out of a book, much to the horror of his more proper sister (and onetime Ed Wood girlfriend) Dolores Fuller, who decries his unregistered armament as the titular "jail bait." What could have led Malone down such a dark path? His straight-arrow cosmetic-surgeon father (Herbert Rawlinson) has some ideas: "Maybe I gave him too much in his youth, that plus the lack of a mother's attention." The lack of a mother's attention does indeed lead Malone to work for shady criminal mastermind Timothy Farrell, who bullies him into helping rob the safe of a theater chain, after a gratuitous strip-tease number. Predictably, unregistered gun ownership proves a gateway to illegal gun use: Malone kills a night watchman during the robbery and Farrell shoots a secretary, who later recovers and fingers Malone as the killer. In spite of a psyche irrevocably twisted by his father's generosity and his mother's inattentiveness, Malone shows signs of a conscience when, guilt-stricken, he visits Rawlinson and offers to give himself up to the police. But Malone's good intentions go horribly awry when Farrell gets to him first and kills him before he can confess. Farrell next tricks Rawlinson into performing cosmetic surgery on him by pretending that his henchmen are holding Malone hostage. Rawlinson performs the operation, but gets the last laugh when, in a plot twist telegraphed several eternities in advance, it's revealed that the good doctor has remade Farrell in the very image of his own cop-killing, much-wanted son. Farrell is subsequently shot to death by the cops, whose gun ownership is not only legal, but essential to their jobs.
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