I Want to Live!

Movie Review: I Want to Live!

Year of Release: 1958
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Robert Wise
Cast: Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent, Theodore Bikel

Plot outline: The true story of small-time lady crook, Barbara Graham, who fought to escape the gas chamber (IMDb).

The movie plays like a hard-boiled trashy B-movie to me - I suppose a lot of it has to do with Susan Hayward (she seems overdramatic to me). Nevertheless, she won a Best Actress Oscar, an award given regularly for playing against type. She acts like a Hollywood dame of the old days - kind of like watching Bette Davis in All About Eve instead of an actual troubled woman falsely accused of a capital crime. Nevertheless, still, the story's quite good. The script is quite fatalistic about the main character's fate. The way the criminal system works in this movie is, if you're guilty once, you're guilty always. The police do everything in their power to trap her into making a confession, including a brilliant scheme involving a friend of an inmate who turns out to be a police informant. The last part of the movie is pretty graphic. What the movie does share with In Cold Blood is the ugliness of capital punishment. This is one of those movies which, as with In Cold Blood, wanted to show us the horrors of the death penalty, and, since the movie claims this person was innocent, a lot of viewers would have been more appalled at the prospect. It is also interesting to see how nice the prison guards are to the condemned woman. They light her cigarettes, entertain her lies, let her choose the radio station, let her dress like a cover girl, and express sorrow for her plight. They even let her wear high heels for her final walk to the gas chamber. But they'll push her in there if they have to. So sorry, just doing my job. The Nazis had the same excuse. The media also get a pasting. A media circus erupts, and a newspaper reporter follows her around, writing exploitive reports and feeling she is very much guilty. He does have a change of heart, however, and soon becomes one of her biggest supporters. Overall, I Want to Live! is an interesting movie. I kind of wish this was a more recent movie, if only so they could find a better, more realistic lead. (DM)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars