Meurtrière Ambition

'Crime of Passion' had all the ingredients to be a good film. It even had all the ingredients to be a great film. The title is attention grabbing enough, but it is also hard to resist any film that has the wonderful Barbara Stanwyck heading the cast. Loved the idea for the story and it is a type of film that you'd see me particularly enjoy. It was interesting seeing Sterling Hayden playing against type and Raymond Burr in a role different to his iconic Perry Mason.

While it is a worth a look (it takes a lot for me to deem anything these days a must avoid), though namely for the cast, there was a much better film somewhere in 'Crime of Passion' that didn't fully make it out. So considering what it had going for it, part of me was disappointed by 'Crime of Passion' while far from disliking it. Would have liked it a lot more if the story was a lot stronger and more focused, because it was that component that brought things down by a too significant degree.

There are a number of good things in 'Crime of Passion'. The best thing about it is the cast. Stanwyck's role is not an easy one to pull off, but she pulls it off very well. There is her usual steel, yet never in a cold way, and how effortlessly she commands the screen, while also giving a little vulnerability. It has been said that she was too old for the role, maybe but actually it didn't distract me that much. Hayden's character on paper sounds dull, but that's not how his own performance came over as and he does great at coming over as level-handed and sympathetic. Burr is distinguished yet menacing as a charmer with a (very) dark side sort of character. Fay Wray does nicely in a role different to her role in 'King Kong' and it was fun seeing Royal Dano as a work rival.

It's not just the cast. It's assuredly directed by Gerd Oswald and the film looks great. Although the story could have done with more atmosphere, the production values are hardly bereft of them. The photography is especially first class. The ominous but not too obviously so score helps too. There are moments where the script thought provokes and has snap, the social commentary is very interesting and insightful. There is intrigue and the film does start off very well.

Sadly, the latter parts of 'Crime of Passion' aren't as strong in particular. While a good deal of the pace is assured and not too filler-like, some of it does lag and if the script was tauter and not as routine or soggy as it at times was that would have made things better. The story loses focus and could have done with a lot more suspense.

Also felt that the story did get far-fetched and not always easy to follow. Capped off by an ending that was too convenient and almost implausible, the writing for the lead character not making much sense.

Definitely worth a viewing, but really wanted to love it and ended up being fairly neutral. 6/10

Crime of Passion (1957)

A gripping widescreen black and white crime film where the loner lost in a complacent world is a woman--played with steely determination by Barbara Stanwyck. In some ways this film is a familiar type, but it has some unique lines that open up as it goes until it becomes a unique tale of seduction and ambition.

You won't see Sterling Hayden better (this is around the time of his defining but more constrained role in Kubrick's "The Killing"), and throw in Raymond Burr and, believe it or not, Fay Ray (of "King Kong" fame, 1933), and you have quite a cast. It moves fast though there is some redundancy to the events sometimes--we get the idea of her ambition, for example, but they give us several examples of it instead of one good one. In general the writing is very smart and sometimes witty, in the hands of a late noir standard bearer, the woman writer Jo Eisinger.

The great dramatic photography is by legendary Joseph LaShelle, and it's all pulled together elegantly by director Gerd Oswald. Who's he? Good question...this is his most respected film (he also did the good "A Kiss Before Dying" which is streamable on Netflix). I think this is a lucky confluence of talents--Stanwyck of course, and Hayden, but also LaShelle and Burr and Eisinger.

It might be no coincidence that one of the themes, in fact the trigger for Stanwyck's change of character halfway through, is a revelation of sexual (gender) stereotypes--men play cards and silly things that sound important, and women sit in the next room not playing cards saying silly things that sound silly. At least in Eisinger's eyes. It's great stuff for 1957, and has more honesty than many later approaches to the problem. Stanwyck's solution, of course, is dubious. She plays a role she played in one of my favorite movies of hers, twenty some years earlier, in "Baby Face," where she sleeps her way to success.

A good one, late in the noir/crime era for this style, but so good it holds up well.

It was interesting to read that Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way I do that the first thing a film should have is a good story. Sometimes some good acting can smooth over some glaring faults in the story, some time it can't. Even the brilliant pyrotechnics of Barbara Stanwyck couldn't quite bring Crime Of Passion off.

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.

Career gal and avowed bachelorette falls for a ten-year veteran on the Los Angeles police force; they marry, but his low-level status at the department--and the bottom-drawer company they must keep on the social set--brings up the wife's ambitious, scheming nature. What begins as an interesting study of a woman columnist quickly turns into a potboiler, with Barbara Stanwyck as the newly-christened suburban housewife with discontent in her eyes. This change of direction nearly doesn't work, though Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden (and Raymond Burr as Hayden's superior) are very good at keeping the scenario engrossing. Barbara's smudgy face and puffy mouth are just the right ingredients to kick-start a frantic modern 'noir' (complete with a '40s-style score by Paul Dunlap), and the actress is really something to behold when she gets hysterical. The plot takes a few twists which replace the potential for irony with flat-out melodrama, yet it remains tart and absorbing on a minor level. **1/2 from ****

The successful columnist of The San Francisco Post Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) is an independent woman that has the intention of never getting married. However, when she meets the LAPD Detective Lt. Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) during the investigation of Dana Case that is resolved with her support, they immediately fall in love for each other and get married. Kathy quits her job and moves to Los Angeles to be a housewife. Bill is very close to his colleagues and their wives, and they have frequent dinner parties at his home, and the boredom of the conversation with other wives and the lack of ambition of Bill in the Police Department make Kathy to plot a scheme to push Bill's career to a higher position. Kathy forces the encounter with his superior Police Inspector Anthony Pope (Raymond Burr) and his wife Alice Pope (Fay Wray) and destroys the friendship of Bill with his immediate superior Police Capt. Charlie Alidos (Royal Dano); then she has one night stand with Tony to get the promise that he will recommend Bill to his position since he is planning to retire. When Kathy realizes that Tony's promise was just pillow talk, the ambitious woman takes a decision with no return.

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.