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Barbara Stanwyck's character Lulu begins the film as an old maid in a small town who spends everything she has on a makeover and a cruise, searching for romance. She finds it in Bob (Adolphe Menjou) and moves to the big city to continue their affair. Eventually he admits to her that he is married and can never leave his wife, about the same time she is about to tell him that she is carrying his child.

The script has a lot of plot holes and unlikely plot twists, which may be blamed on Frank Capra' early effort at script writing. However, Stanwyck's optimistic performance keeps you from noticing the holes and inconsistencies until after the film is over.

A writer/director other than Capra could have made the plot of this film so much darker and more melodramatic. For example, Bob's character would be the villain in another version of the same story. His actions in the film repeatedly betray the women in his life. Yet this is Stanwyck's film, so we always see Bob from her character's point of view, bathed in her life-long love and admiration. More importantly, all the characters' actions are free from the moral censures the Production Code would soon require.

In the role of villain, we instead have Ralph Bellamy as a boorish tabloid journalist. Bellamy's character holds long grudges, but also carries a torch for Lulu for years, despite receiving no encouragement. Once the Production Code was being enforced, the unmarried suitor would have been the clear "good-guy".

The bottom line is that I enjoyed this film more than a description of the plot would suggest. The fact that I enjoyed it is completely down to Barbara Stanwyck's performance, so check it out if you are a fan of her work.

This film's story, with a lead like Laurence Olivier, could have been made as a suspenseful character study, hinging on moral dilemmas and the consequences of our actions. Instead, everything in the film is about either good or bad luck. The leads spend the film doing very little, waiting to see if fate will let them off the hook. Incidentally, the 21 days of the title are covered in their entirety by an intertitle reading "Three weeks later." Laurence Olivier plays Larry, a habitually unsuccessful young man, in love with an equally unlucky young woman (Vivian Leigh as Wanda). One evening they are confronted by a man announcing he is Wanda's husband, and demanding money from the pair. There is a struggle, and Larry strangles the man. The victim is given no redeeming qualities at all, not the slightest shade of grey. It is not explicit but is implied that he married Wanda so he could pimp her out. The filmed struggle tries to make the death look accidental with a different "Cause of Death", but the later trial does not bear that out. It seems that the filmmakers wanted to completely absolve Larry of any moral wrongdoing, yet there is still no doubt that Larry killed a man in anger. What Bad Luck.

Larry seeks out the advice of his older, and much more successful brother. Larry's brother Keith (Leslie Banks) is about to be appointed a judge in the British legal system. Besides a genuine concern for Larry, Keith is concerned that a scandal will affect his own prospects, or at least embarrass him, so he advises Larry to destroy all evidence and flee the country.

Before anything else can happen, an unconnected man is arrested for the crime. Now everyone just waits to see if the arrested man will be charged, be convicted, etc. Keith still wants Larry to leave the country just in case, while Larry wants to wait and see what happens. He is willing to turn himself in, but only at the last minute, and only if he absolutely must, to save the other man from hanging. The great missed opportunity is that we never see Larry's thought processes. There is no wrestling with his conscience, no guilt for his crime nor temptation to save himself by fleeing. Those crucial 21 days of waiting are skipped entirely.

Vivien Leigh has top billing in this film but is entirely wasted. Her main contribution is to look very pretty. The supporting characters are all more interesting than the leads. In particular, Leslie Banks as the brother does show conflicted emotions. His character comes across as neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but also far less indifferent to ongoing events than the lovers. Banks puts Olivier's one-dimensional Larry to shame.

Finally, the ending of this film is a disappointing cop-out, even for a film that has left everyone's choices up to Luck.

Crime of Passion was advertised like a noir, is filmed like a noir, and even has a cast of A-list noir stars - Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr. But the plot is missing the elements of suspense and danger that mark good noir films.

Film genres tend to follow patterns, more noticeable when you step outside them. Another genre that existed in the 1950's was what was then called a "woman's picture", films that focused on what women were assumed to be most interested in - love, marriage, and social status. They could also be cautionary tales to women to behave within society's rules. Not exactly what we now call a "soap", but similar. The script for this film follows the patterns of a "woman's picture". Even though the entire film is just under 90 minutes, the first quarter is all backstory for Stanwyck's character, Kathy. We see her prior career, how she met her husband, and their almost immediate marriage, before the plot gets going. Kathy's problem is that her husband Bill (Sterling Hayden) is happy in his job, with no ambition to move higher. Dissatisfied with their social circle, Kathy must act behind his back to get him promoted.

The "crime" of the title happens almost at the end of the film. A real noir film would have skipped all the backstory and social one-upmanship, and started at the point when our heroine finally stepped outside the rules. Things start to go wrong, the tension finally starts to build, and suddenly everything is wrapped up and the film ends without a struggle.

Barbara Stanwyck has distinguished herself both in better noirs and better soaps, in this film she plays to both genres, competently, but not memorably. Because Stanwyck is the focus, neither of her co-stars are given much to work with. Sterling Hayden does well enough cast against type as her husband, a competent police detective happy with his position. Note: in this film, criminals are occasionally discussed but never seen. Raymond Burr normally played menacing villains at this point in his career. Here, his form of menace is mostly that he sees through Kathy while she keeps throwing herself in his path to advance her husband.

Essentially, someone took a plot outline about a discontented housewife and for unknown reasons, filmed it in the visual style of a noir, then marketed it as such. But stark shadows alone do not a noir make. When you try to wrap a story from one genre in the trappings of another, fans of both genres will be unhappy with the result.