SYNOPSICS
Crime of Passion (1956) is a English movie. Gerd Oswald has directed this movie. Barbara Stanwyck,Sterling Hayden,Raymond Burr,Fay Wray are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1956. Crime of Passion (1956) is considered one of the best Crime,Drama,Film-Noir,Thriller movie in India and around the world.
Kathy is a smart and tough 1950's advice columnist at a San Francisco newspaper, with her name plastered on billboards all over the city. One day, Bill Doyle, a Los Angeles detective, walks into her office - it is instant attraction. After marrying Bill, Kathy gives up her career and becomes a homemaker. However, she is not your typical 1950's homemaker. After hosting several cocktail parties in their San Fernando Valley home, she realizes that Bill is content with his position, and shows no ambition in furthering himself. Kathy will not sit idly by while everyone around her is "moving up in the world". She personally takes upon herself the task of pushing Bill's career along, even if it comes down to murder.
Same Actors
Same Director
Crime of Passion (1956) Reviews
Pushin' Hubby Up The Rungs
We've all heard the saying that behind every great man, there's a little woman pushing him on. But what if the big lug has no desire to be pushed on? What's a gal to do then? Well, if the woman is Barbara Stanwyck in the 1957 film "Crime of Passion," she connives, eliminates the competition, arranges phony accidents, engages in adultery and finally commits homicide, all to push hubby up the rungs of success. In this film, Babs plays a tough-dame reporter in San Francisco who falls hard for L.A. cop Sterling Hayden. She even marries the big galoot after a couple of dates and moves to Lalaland with him. Anyway, that's the setup of what turns out to be a fairly interesting, sexually frank, compact little noir, featuring a once-in-a-lifetime cast. Stanwyck, 50 here and nudging toward the end of her spectacular film career, is as intense as ever (she always gave her all in every picture); Hayden is his typically macho, upright self; Raymond Burr, playing Hayden's boss, is a tad less sleazy than usual but still not to be trusted; and Fay Wray, also 50 here and approaching the end of HER career, is fine in her small role as Burr's wife. Director Gerd Oswald, a favorite amongst fans of the old "Outer Limits" (and who also went on to direct Burr on TV's "Perry Mason"), does his usual excellent job as well. The presences of Stanwyck and Hayden, who had starred in such noir classics as "Double Indemnity" ('44), "The Asphalt Jungle" ('50) and "The Killing" ('56), add greatly to the noirish feel here. And if this film shows anything, it's that there's one place on Earth you DON'T want to be: on Babs' bad side!
surprising social critique
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).
A hair slow at times, but really well acted and filmed. And widescreen.
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.
Thanks to TCM
My comments are not only for the movie and its stars but for TCM keeping these noir movies and other "oldies" on air for future generations to have the priveledge of viewing and even for its social education to give them a window of movies and life past. It is very important for us to never forget where todays movies started and what real stars and actors are.... At my age it is very nostalgic to return to the movies I grew up watching the actors I saw on the big screen. Movies will never be like this again and the present actors with the exception of a few will never light up the screen and cause our imaginations to go wild! Now movies have to show every nuance of reality so no one can have an imagination or self thought process...they do it all for you@
A pre-feminist tantrum? No, "Witness to Murder" reveals the hysteria behind the cardboard image of the '50s happy housewife. - Spoilers
What Eric Chapman doesn't seem to realize when he dismisses "Crime of Passion" as a "pre-feminist tantrum" is that in its day, the movie was subversive and shocking (it still packs something of a punch). It's the story of a career woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who, tn middle age, marries a cop (Sterling Hayden) who forbids her to work, condemning her to a life of luncheons and card games. The triviality and emptiness of this life is so soul-destroying, the Stanwyck character essentially goes crazy, and the movie ends with Hayden arresting his wife for murder. The budget is more than modest, even by 1957 standards, and it's hardly the most cinematic movie in the world, yet it would have worked beautifully on a double bill with socially critical melodramas of the day like Douglas Sirk's "All That Heaven Allows." It's only fair to see "Crime of Passion" in that context.