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The film has a stark, realistic look, an excellent script, a pounding jazz score, and a strong supporting cast--but it is Susan Hayward's legendary performance that makes the film work. She gives us a Graham who is half gun moll, half good time girl, and tough as nails all the way through--but who is nonetheless likeable, perhaps even admirable in her flat rebellion against a sickeningly hypocritical and repulsively white-bread society. Although Hayward seems slightly artificial in the film's opening scenes, she quickly rises to the challenge of the role and gives an explosive performance as notable for its emotional hysteria as for its touching humanity.
As the story moves toward its climax, the detail with which director Wise shows preparations for execution in the gas chamber and the intensity of Hayward's performance add up to one of the most powerful sequences in film history.
... Read more ›"I Want to Live!" tells the story of Barbara Graham, a wild party girl with a rap sheet a mile long who was convicted of murder in the early 1950's and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Penitentiary. The script whitewashes Graham's story, painting her as a more sympathetic character (i.e., "innocent") than she had been in real life, but Hayward comes through with a gutsy tour de force performance that provides the film with just the right amount of gritty toughness that elevates it out of the league of soap opera. Her Barbara Graham may be a "victim" of circumstances and a flawed legal system, but she is also loud, vulgar, crude, flippant, and antisocial, often working against her own best interests. And Hayward never hits a false note, provoking the audience to a strange mixture of contempt and compassion, repulsion and attraction.
... Read more ›About the inaccuracies...Some of the reviewers here obviously were taken in by the film's implication that Barbara was innocent. She, in fact, was every bit as guilty as Perkins and Santo. She was also a laudanam and heroin addict, contrary to the film script, and had abandoned her (fourth) husband AND her (third) son before the murder ever took place, not afterwards. The film shows her being tailed by informants after leaving her son at his grandmother's; she had actually been out scoring drugs. The apprehension of Perkins, Santo and Babs took place in the early morning, without being a media or spectator event, and the police busted down the apartment door to find the trio engaged in a menage a troi that was far too scandalous for viewers in 1958. Ditto the fact that Babs carried on a lesbian affair with one of the other female inmates, the same one who introduced her to the undercover cop she tried to use as an alibi.
As for the crime itself? The story told by the first witness for the prosecution was the real version: Babs had been the one to knock on the door and convince Monahan to let them in, pretending their car wouldn't start, and had helped to pistol-whip and gag her.
... Read more ›happening to her.
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