Sometimes the all-star credentials of a vintage film draw you to it more than subject matter or a “classic” reputation. And occasionally, it’s the legend attached to it, the Hollywood lore surrounding it that piques your curiosity.

Any film by Nicholas Ray is worth checking out. The director of “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Johnny Guitar” was a genuine Hollywood maverick, getting his start under the studio system, bristling at that and swaggering through later years on a reputation made by films such as “They Live By Night,” a rep trumpeted by the French “New Wave” cheerleaders behind the camera or writing for Cahiers du Cinema.

Joan Fontaine was an Oscar winner, an English-American actress and early “Hitchcock blonde,” fresh off the masterpiece “Letter from an Unknown Woman” and just entering her 30s.

Maybe the phrase “Born to be Bad” isn’t something you’d attach to this petite starlet, most associated with romantic victimhood in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and “Suspicion.” But she was nominated for Best Actress three times. She had some range.

Any movie with Robert Ryan as a brutish suitor, Mel Ferrer as a bitchy artist “friend,” Zachary Scott as Fontaine’s character’s romantic ideal and Joan Leslie (“Sgt. York,” “Rhapsody in Blue”) as the rival she must steal him from has built in appeal.

And the dialogue they’re performing has snap, crackle and pop to it. Ryan, playing an aspiring novelist, gets some of his tastiest lines ever as Nick, the guy who covets a young woman whose eyes are on a pricier prize.

“You seen the view? It looks better with me in it!”

“If you ever draw an honest breath, I wanna be there. I’ve never seen anybody choke to death!”

 “I love you so much I wish I liked you.”

But the story behind “Born to be Bad” is that new RKO Pictures owner Howard Hughes had one of his Hollywood obsessions over Fontaine, insisting on casting her — at 32 — as a young, possibly innocent “business school” ingenue on the hunt for a rich, socially-connected husband. And the rebel Ray wasn’t happy about it.

If Ray had any say, casting the high-born, mustachioed Zachary Scott (“Mildred Pierce,” “The Southerner”) as the prize Fontaine’s Christobal covets, catches, uses and cheats on was telling. Scott was a near dead-ringer for Hughes.

“Bad,” based on a novel by Anne Parrish, came out the same year as iconic back-stabbing-in-acting drama “All About Eve.” Something was in the air in those years, and stories about disadvantaged women with cunning, agency and no scruples about getting what they wanted were all the rage.

The stakes were higher in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” but feminine wiles were taking it on the chin in films made by the Hollywood patriarchy.

Publishing assistant Donna (Leslie) is prepping for a posh post-play party for her society swell fiance Curtis (Scott) when this waif that her boss (Harold Vermilyea) talked her into taking in shows up a day early.

Christabel (Fontaine) makes a great show of contrition and excuses. But she’s invited into the big party, and we quickly realize that’s what she wanted all along.

She hadn’t counted on being teased by the sarcastic painter Gobby (Ferrer) or man-handled by Mr. Testosterone Poisoning, the novelist Nick (Ryan). But she won’t let them distract her from the dashing man with money in the tuxed, the one engaged to her hostess, Donna.

Christabel ingratiates herself into their circle, a model-thin clothes horse with bottle blonde beauty and a disarming way of sabotaging Donna and Nick while pulling the wool over her Uncle John’s eyes over that whole “business school” dodge.

Where “All About Eve” had George Sanders and eventually Betty Davis playing characters “wise” to the machinations of the striver, Eve, “Born to be Bad” has Nick and Gobby, whose may not be as gay as his bitchiness suggests.

“My dear girl, apart from painting my major occupation is convincing women’s husbands that I’m harmless.

Nick sees her as “two people,” “one fictional” a “pretty little gal who sees herself getting all the things she never had,” and the “real” Christabel, who infatuates him.

There’s little getting around the fact that Fontaine is simply miscast as this scheming golddigger. Like her sister, Olivia de Havilland, she lacked menace and an ability to suggest bad intent and native cunning.

Without any murderous undertone, there’s no “film noir” to this drama. It’s a lower-stakes version of “All About Eve” without the guts to let the “Bad” girl get her way, by hook or by crook.

But the movie surrounding Fontaine can be bitchy fun, with much of its edge coming from its anachronistic take on macho courtship. If we believe the movie’s lore, Ryan must have been given a blank check by Ray to abuse Fontaine. “Manhandling” doesn’t do the way he grabs and mashes on this willowy Englishwoman justice.

Nick’s sexism has him pulling Donna into his lap so he can give her a “shoulder to cry on.” The dear. Nick is Norman Mailer, affecting a Hemingway machismo but only able to impose his vision of himself on “the weaker sex.”

And Ferrer is just as interesting, a character we can easily imagine might fancy rich blade Curtis for himself. Gobby is a “friend” but never a confidante to our anti-heroine, letting her see that he sees through her just as Nick does, but without the bruises.

This isn’t one of the top drawer pictures in Ray’s portfolio. But his style and cynicism, eye for conflict and ear for cutting dialogue make him every bit the “auteur” that the French proclaimed him to be shortly after this came out.

If he wasn’t having one or two over on Hughes — in casting Howard-look-alike Scott, in having Ryan yank Fontaine around, and in showing off a very good actress’s weak spots — we’d realize soon enough that the rebel was sure as hell was capable of it.

Rating: approved

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Joan Leslie, Zachary Scott and Mel Ferrer.

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Ray, scripted by Edith Sommer and Charles Schnee, based on a novel by Anne Parrish. An RKO release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:29