Da Ambição ao Crime

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 ****

So thinks Barbara Stanwyck in "Crime of Passion," a 1957 film also starring Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr.

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.

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.

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.

... is who Kathy (Barbara Stanwyck) is. She's a reporter on a paper that usually gives her lonely hearts column assignments, but then she gets a chance to report on the case of a woman who has killed her lover. She writes a sympathetic column in which she encourages the woman to call her and talk, she does, and as a result Kathy finds out where she is hiding. Then she encounters the cheerless LAPD detective Charlie Alidos who tells her to give up the woman's location or he'll have her arrested, indicating that she should be home cooking dinner for her non-existent husband. Kathy gives Alidos a bum steer as far as the woman's location because she'd rather give this arrest to Alidos' partner, Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden), but he sets her straight that he and Alidos are partners and you just don't do that to your partner.

Kathy gets a new job in a different city as a result of her helping break this case, but her new romance with Bill Doyle is getting in the way, and they marry in haste when she makes one of her trips back to California to see him. As was the custom in the 50s, she stops working and becomes a housewife. But being a wife and in particular the wife of a cop in the 50s is particularly boring, and she is soon going nuts from the constant company of the Stepford wives who comprise the wives of the cops who come over to play cards with Bill a few times a week. She also discovers that Bill is not particularly ambitious. He just thinks being a cop is a pretty secure job with OK pay and good retirement prospects and that is the end of it for him.

So Kathy starts out to be ambitious for Bill if he will not be so for himself. She studies the driving habits of the wife of the head of detectives, Tony Pope (Raymond Burr) and manages to maneuver an "auto accident" with her, befriends her, and gets herself and Bill invited to their house for their parties. But almost immediately Tony Pope lets her know he has her number, knows the accident was planned, and that she is trying to get her husband promoted. But he is also obviously fascinated with her. At this point, if Kathy just wanted to promote her husband, she'd give this effort up since Pope has her cold busted. But she still hangs around Pope until an affair occurs. Why? Because Kathy likes the danger and excitement of dealing with Pope versus the ennui of being just another housewife. But Pope himself has a conscience and cuts off contact with her as a result of him feeling bad for betraying and cheating on both Bill and his own wife. This is when Kathy's actions become erratic and also, just plain dumb. Complications ensue.

I particularly liked seeing Raymond Burr as the rather enigmatic chief of detectives. Not a white knight as he was in Perry Mason, but also not one his psychopathic characters when he was starring in the noirs, it was a nuanced role for him. Also note he is close to a normal weight here. This was made just as he was starting out on Perry Mason, and one of the conditions of getting that role was that he lose 60 pounds.