I Want to Live!

The winner of Best Actress for 1958 was Susan Hayward, who chews the scenery as party-girl turned death-row convict Barbara Graham in I Want to Live! Hayward had been nominated four times previously without winning, so it was probably a bit of seeing her as due that got her the prize, for the film is really a glorified exploitation flick.

I enjoyed watching this film, though, because it's a real time capsule. It's very much of its time period, with a jazz score, played by a combo led by Gerry Mulligan (with plenty of bongos) and has a trashy feel to it. Throughout the fifties there were several films about juvenile delinquents, low-life criminals, and beatniks that were supposedly cautionary tales but really were outlets for vicarious living. That being said, though, I Want to Live! is much better than it has any right being, and that's because it was directed by Robert Wise.

Wise, who would go on to win Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music, was a master of pacing. He was the editor of Citizen Kane, and made one of the best noir films ever, The Set-Up, which a real-time tale of a boxer who is pressured to take a dive. I Want to Live! is Wise at his most skillful, with brilliant use of editing and sound. There's also some fascinating documentary-style footage of how the gas chamber is readied for a condemned prisoner. I know, from watching this film, that it's cyanide "eggs" dunked into sulphuric acid that create the noxious fumes that snuff out the prisoner's life.

Hayward is in almost every scene, and acts as if she can smell that Oscar. She plays an amoral woman who is constantly in trouble with the law, and falls in with some rough characters. An elderly woman is murdered during the course of a robbery. We don't see that robbery, so we can't be sure whether she's guilty or not. By focusing on her rounds of appeals, and casting her supporters (a reporter played by Simon Oakland and a psychiatrist played by Theodore Bikel) in positive light, one can draw the conclusion that she was innocent. Hayward, though, admitted in an interview that she concluded Graham was guilty. Not knowing how it turns out (a rarity for a fifty-year-old movie) I found the ending quite suspenseful, and won't ruin it here.