I Want to Live! **** (1958, Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent) – Movie Review 3404

‘Thank goodness, we can all relax, Susan Hayward’s won the Oscar she has been chasing for 20 years.’

Susan Hayward’s Best Actress Oscar-winning portrayal of Barbara Graham, a card-sharp, thief and prostitute who was sentenced to die in the San Quentin gas chamber for a murder no one is sure she committed, is the rock-solid centre of director Robert Wise’s still relevant 1958 anti-capital punishment drama I Want to Live!

Two men Graham knows murder an older woman, get caught, think she has helped the police, and as revenge tell them that she is the killer. A habituée of seedy bars and previously sentenced for petty crimes, she firmly maintains her innocence but no one believes her.

The powerful but controversial and downbeat film was the brainchild of unswerving producer Walter Wanger, who was rewarded with six Oscar nominations for his film (though only the one Academy Award) and a hit at the box office. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was not however nominated as Best Picture.

It is, quite properly, Hayward’s show, but Wise’s cool-handed direction, Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz’s hard-hitting screenplay, Lionel Lindon’s striking black-and-white cinematography, Johnny Mandel’s great jazz score and the fine support playing also contribute strongly to its success.

Also in the cast are Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent, Theodore Bikel, Wesley Lau, Philip Coolidge, John Marley, Dabbs Greer and Gavin McLeod.

[Spoiler alert] Barbara Graham was 31 when she was executed in 1955 and Hayward is 10 years older. Graham is shown as a tragic victim of circumstance, but Hayward later admitted that, after much research, she thought she was most likely guilty of the murder of Mabel Monohan.

Wise insisted Mankiewicz’s original screenplay be thrown out and a new one written, and disagreed with the Writers’ Guild decision to give him co-credit. Wise got permission from San Quentin prison to see the gas chamber and witness an actual execution provided his being there would never be used in conjunction with any film publicity. The gas chamber scene was filmed on a replica set on a sound stage but the end credits are filmed outside San Quentin.

Betsy Ann Smith from Wakefield, Virginia, won a bit part in this film as a prize on The Price Is Right.

It was remade as a TV movie in 1983 by director David Lowell Rich, starring former Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner.

At the Oscars, Hayward thanked her producer ‘Walter Wanger, without whom none of this would have been possible’. Wanger replied: ‘Thank goodness, we can all relax, Susie’s won the Oscar she has been chasing for 20 years.’

Susan Hayward (1917-75) had four previous Best Actress Oscar nominations – Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), My Foolish Heart (1949), With a Song in My Heart (1952) and I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955) – and also won the 1956 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award for I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3404

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