Füge eine Handlung in deiner Sprache hinzuKathy leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs. Her drive to advance Bill's career soo... Alles lesenKathy leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs. Her drive to advance Bill's career soon takes her down a dangerous path.Kathy leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs. Her drive to advance Bill's career soon takes her down a dangerous path.
- Party Guest
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- Reporter in Newspaper Office
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It's a strange film because her character makes absolutely no sense, accept in terms of hormones. She's a sob sister columnist for a quaint metropolitan newspaper in San Francisco and she's gotten a murderess on the run to write to her. Which of course draws the attention of a couple of homicide cops played by Sterling Hayden and Royal Dano.
Dano is all business and he wants a lead on where to catch the woman. But Stanwyck is eying Hayden like a prime rump roast in the butcher shop and she sends Dano off on a false lead, but gives the real goods to Hayden. So much for her job as reporter and protecting sources. Hayden doesn't go for it, but the two of them hit it off anyway and are soon happily married.
For a career woman, Stanwyck seems to settle down to housewife bliss, but she seethes with ambition for her husband to rise in the department. Hayden's a happy go lucky sort who just takes things as they come. Not good enough, she sets her mind to promoting her husband and if that includes giving a little nookie to his boss Raymond Burr behind the back of his wife Fay Wray, so be it.
Her change from career woman to sexual manipulator in Crime Of Passion makes no sense at all. She's a bad woman all right, right up there with her Oscar nominated Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. But whereas Phyllis was one ice princess, this Stanwyck does things on the fly. Her crime when she commits it is indeed one of passion.
This was not a film Stanwyck was particularly happy about, but she said that good stories for her and her contemporaries in the Fifties were hit or miss basis. Sadly Crime Of Passion is the latter.
The film-noir "Crime of Passion" is quite dated today but I believe that it was ahead of time in 1957 with an engaging and amoral story of ambition and murder. Barbara Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson Doyle, an ambitious woman in the 50's not tailored to be a conventional housewife that loves her husband that is a man that prioritizes his family over his career. The emptiness of her life associated to the lack of interest of her beloved husband in his career drives Kathy insane and capable of committing a murder and destroy her family and certainly Bill's career. Just as a curiosity, the wife of Police Inspector Tony Pope is Fay Wray, the unforgettable Ann Darrow from "King Kong". My vote is seven.
Title (Brazil): "Da Ambição ao Crime" ("From the Ambition to Crime")
Note: On 24 Jul 2018, I saw this film again.
Stanwyck is newspaper woman Kathy Ferguson who, in the beginning, is going after the story of a crime being investigated by Doyle and Alidos (Hayden and Royal Dano).
Dani gives the newsroom a speech on the idea of "let us do our job" and Stanwyck is the only one who speaks up, stating, "And we're trying to do our jobs." Alidos' reply is a killer: "You should be home making dinner for your husband." Do you love it?
Doyle and Kathy fall in love and get married a little too soon after they meet. Kathy, a woman who craves excitement and new adventures in life, is stuck with a bunch of vapid women she can't tolerate.
Making things worse, her husband is a gentle and loving man but he has no ambition. And she's bored out of her skull. Of course, now that she's married, there's no question of her working.
In an effort to help him, Kathy cultivates a friendship with the wife (Fay Wray) of Police Inspector Pope (Burr) and then has a flirtation with the inspector himself. It leads to problems (that's putting it mildly).
Stanwyck is terrific in a difficult role, that of a woman with more going on internally than even she knew; Burr does a good job as a hard-nosed, cold police inspector.
Sterling Hayden has never been a favorite of mine. To me he always comes off as a dufus. In "Crime of Passion," he's excellent as a good man whose only ambition is to be happy and spend time with his wife. Alas, his wife didn't share his dream.
This is a small movie, probably a B, directed by Gerd Oswald that is shot in black and white, probably reflective of what people were seeing on television by then. The twists and turns will keep the viewer off-balance and interested. Not to mention the pervasive '50s attitudes toward women.
There's nothing in this movie that hasn't been done before and better. It doesn't feel like an independent production from the late fifties but rather like an RKO thriller from six or seven years earlier. And not one of the better ones. Director Gerd Oswald has proved himself elsewhere to be at times a superb craftsman, but Jo Eisingers by the numbers script conspire with mediocre production values to defeat him. And down he goes. What makes the movie somewhat watchable is the acting. Barbara Stanwyck gives her all to the role of a career woman who, though smart enough, maybe lacks the experience to see that the average joe she falls for, though amiable in his gruff way, is simply not the man for her. I find her performance believable. As her hubby, the towering Sterling Hayden, he of the sullen expression and morose, inexplicably angry line readings, is likewise okay, though I sense that he's not always focused on his acting. I've seen him do tighter work. In a smaller but pivotal role Raymond Burr is his usual polite, somewhat impassive, inscrutable self, bringing authority and, well, weight, to his role as Hayden's superior. Interestingly, all three performers were nearing the end of a particular phase of his career. Stanwyck was soon to quit movies for television, and when she returned it was as a character actress. Hayden was just about to quit movies, too, though like Stanwyck he would go on to interesting things later. And Burr was soon to triumph on television as Perry Mason, leaving behind a decade's worth of good character work in film, of which this is one of the last examples.
With Stanwyck, Burr and Hayden in the cast I was looking forward to this film and on that front I was happy enough because the cast were as solid as those names would suggest. The problem is not with them but rather with a plot that moves too quickly, doesn't always ring true and is tidied up too easily. We meet Kathy as an aspiring journalist who has ambitions but within a few scenes she has settled down with Bill – a man that one key scene in their new home tells us, that she really doesn't know at all but it is clear to the viewer that the life models for these two don't align. Suddenly we have personal ambitions replaced with ambitions for Bill's career and from there things go wrong in ways that don't really ring true either. I liked Kathy as a character but her frustrations are all over the place – she hates the domestic life of the housewife circle but yet her attempts at betterment are focused on Bill, not herself. Her relationship with Tony Pope is also out of nowhere and again doesn't convince. From here things move very quickly to a conclusion that is far too tidy for its own good and doesn't satisfy as it should.
The delivery of the situations always feels rushed and although it pushes a dark tone, it doesn't support it with the material. The cast do all they can though and indeed it is Stanwyck that makes the difference as she sells her character the best she can. Her driven and frustrated performance makes the unconvincing narrative a little less unconvincing. Hayden is solid as you expect and I liked this naïve, rather plain- living character. Burr is a decent presence but he is a narrative device rather than a character – he serves this function well but nothing more.
Crime of Passion should have been a much stronger film but instead the narrative is unconvincing and jumps events without making good connections. The cast help cover for this and give good turns but the film is not really deserving of their efforts.
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- WissenswertesThe last film noir roles of both Barbara Stanwyck and Raymond Burr. It also comes towards the ends of their film careers in general. Both would soon transition to working primarily in television and appearing only occasionally in movies. Burr notably moved from the villainous characters he often portrayed in films to long-running success as the heroic defense attorney on Perry Mason (1957). Stanwyck would later go on to star on Big Valley (1965).
- PatzerWhen Kathy calls Alice from the phone booth and hears she is leaving for Honolulu, the reflection of the cameraman is seen all through the scene on the back window of the booth (above left Kathy's head), and it moves as the camera pulls back.
- Zitate
Kathy Doyle: I hope all your socks have holes in them and I can sit for hours and hours darning them.
Bill Doyle: I um, I have other plans for you.
- VerbindungenFeatured in Noir Alley: Crime of Passion (2017)
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Details
- Erscheinungsdatum
- Herkunftsland
- Sprache
- Auch bekannt als
- Crime of Passion
- Drehorte
- Malibu Canyon Road, Santa Monica Mountains, Kalifornien, USA(Kathy drives twisty canyon road with tunnel returning home from Pope's house)
- Produktionsfirma
- Weitere beteiligte Unternehmen bei IMDbPro anzeigen
- Laufzeit1 Stunde 26 Minuten
- Farbe
- Seitenverhältnis
- 1.66 : 1