I Want to Live! (1958)

Directed by Robert Wise. Starring Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent, Wesley Lau, James Philbrook, Lou Krugman, Joe De Santis, Philip Cooldige, Theodore Bikel, Gage Clarke, Bartlett Robinson, Raymond Bailey, Gertrude Flynn, John Marley.

There’s surprisingly little mildew growing on this persuasive assault on capital punishment, based on articles by journalist Edward Montgomery and letters from Barbara Graham. Hayward won an Academy Award playing Graham, a tough-as-nails “fast” party girl and petty criminal who associates with the wrong people when she’s accused of murdering an elderly woman; she protests her innocence, but her alibi goes unsupported in court and she ends up on death row. Shaky opening scenes struggle to keep grips on the diffuse narrative and stagy artificiality, but the film turns compelling in the later acts, especially the meticulous attention to detail once Graham is on the pathway to the gas chamber; these late chapters are more suspenseful than they have any right to be considering that what ultimately happens is a foregone conclusion. Intelligently directed for such a melodramatic situation (a reminder that Wise may have been in the director’s seat for The Sound of Music, but he did The Haunting right before that), with a pummeling jazz score from Johnny Mandel. Scripted by Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz, and it’s an effective example of a permissive rewrite of history, primarily in the way they make it clear that Graham was innocent, when no evidence in real-life ever surfaced to suggest as much—it’s the uncertainty that forms the bedrock of this impassioned argument against state-approved executions.

79/100