Meurtrière Ambition

Crime of Passion sees ambitious journalist Kathy fall for and marry the simple cop Bill Doyle and move into a world of settled domesticity. Her ambitions however are not satisfied and as she tries to manipulate her way up the social and career ladder for her and Bill, she loses sight of what is important and things start to go wrong.

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.

For a movie with the word passion in the title this modest 1957 noir wannabe never builds up a head of steam. It tells the tale of a successful San Francisco Dear Abby-type columnist who inexplicably falls in love with a taciturn, unambitious police officer from Los Angeles. After a whirlwind romance, these two lovebirds settle down to a life of dull domesticity in L.A. Though the woman has given up her writing career, she soon finds that she's too intelligent and ambitious to be a housewife. She encourages her husband to seek advancement in the police department, but politics isn't his thing. He likes being where he is. Rather than do the smart thing, and return to writing, the woman becomes a meddler, and in time gets into deep personal doo-doo.

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.

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.

Don't be put off by the negative commentary on this film (which surprises me almost as much as the film's unflinching social critique). Stanwyck gives a strong performance in an unusual late-cycle noir; unusual in that it opens in conventional noir style, wraps up the first noir plot in less than ten minutes, then proceeds into insightful and incisive melodrama. Sharper socially than even Fritz Lang's late noirs, "Crime of Passion" reminds us of the "nostalgia" for the "happy family values" of the 1950's for the wishful (?) thinking that it is. Stanwyck's slow descent into middle-class torpor and madness (she's a sharp, witty, intelligent woman who saddles herself with a maddeningly boring and conventional cop husband, played nicely against type by Sterling Hayden) lays bare the social nightmare presented to women desiring anything but the conventional patriarchal lifestyle (at one point, the LA police captain tells Stanwyck that she should be at home making her husband supper-- a line which haunts both Stanwyck and the film).