sleeper54's write-off:
Lean-n-Mean III


When I watched I Want to Live! a couple of months back, I found myself trying to compare this film to In Cold Blood (1967). Where In Cold Blood was a dark and gritty picture, I Want to Live! (1958) feels more like a B-picture to me, although there's still some interesting things here, and both films are based on true-crime stories.

I'll try to describe the plot the best I can here with what little memory and notes I have. Basically, Susan Hayward is a bad girl -- the sort of woman who hangs out with the wrong crowd, including criminals. She finds herself in jail for a year on a perjury charge after giving a false alibi for two of her criminal friends who were charged with armed robbery. Once she is released from jail, she still remains with the wrong crowd, but this time eventually wants to go straight, sort of, with marriage, kids, white picket fence, whatever.

The man she marries, however, is a drug addict who is more in love with his drugs than with his wife and family, and spends all their money. She's in trouble with the bill collectors and landlord, but it's when she's falsely accused of murder (committed by, yet again, her criminal friends) when she's in the biggest trouble of all -- which could all end in the gas chamber.

The movie plays like a hard-boiled trashy B-movie to me -- I suppose a lot of it has to do with Hayward. She won Best Actress Oscar, but she seems overdramatic to me. She acts like a Hollywood dame of the old days -- kind of like watching Bette Davis in All About Eve instead of an actual troubled woman falsely accused of a capital crime. Her performance is too fake for this kind of story, I think.

Nevertheless, the story's quite good. The script is quite fatalistic about the main character's fate. The way the criminal system works in this movie is, if you're guilty once, you're always guilty. The police do everything in their power to trap her into making a confession, including a brilliant scheme involving a friend of an inmate who turns out to be a police informant. It's easy for the cops to believe shes guilty especially since, later on, she's diagnosed as a sociopath -- so of course she's capable of murder!

The last part of this movie is pretty graphic. What this movie does share with In Cold Blood is the ugliness of capital punishment. This is one of those movies which, as with In Cold Blood, wanted to show us the horrors of the death penalty, and, since the movie claims this person was innocent, I'm sure a lot of viewers would have been more appalled at the prospect.

The media also get a pasting. A media circus erupts, and a newspaper reporter follows her around, writing exploitive reports and feeling she is very much guilty. He does have a change of heart, however, and soon becomes one of her biggest supporters.

Overall, I Want to Live! is an interesting movie. I kind of wish this was a more recent movie, if only so they could find a better, more realistic lead. But the script is a good examination of a woman from the wrong side of the tracks who just can't seem to get that lucky break and cross over.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV