Though the internet seems to increasingly denigrate the importance of punctuation, once upon a time it was vital to our sense of understanding language. Would I Want To Live! have any of the same feverish impact without that exclamation mark at the end of its title? Perhaps. But it signifies the bold stance of this cry for social justice in a millisecond. I mean, just look at this poster! Only Britain's notorious newspaper The Daily Mail has taglines that long these days.
That boldness is a quality more of the film's frenzied marketing than of the film itself; director Robert Wise, whose centennial we're marking this week, excised the closing rhetoric that producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz was insisting upon, sure that if an audience wasn't convinced of the film's social statement by then, a few platitudes wouldn't make a difference. As our series of pieces has and will demonstrate, Wise was an extremely adaptable filmmaker who transcended genre, but he often pursued work that aligned with his anti-establishment politics.
Never more so than here [More...]
I Want to Live! is an incredibly direct social drama which is at pains to underline the injustice of capital punishment.
Wise visited San Quentin, the setting for the incredibly ponderous climactic execution, and witnessed an execution for himself, all for the cause of the accurate depiction of the painful process on screen. The camera lingers gruesomely on the cyanide pellets, strange slimy ovals tossed around in thick black gloves. It doesn't even demonise the men tasked with these technicalities; Wise, with his usual even hand, posits the whole social system as the enemy, rather than any part of it. This is visualised most vividly in the mass of old men who gather to witness the execution, a wall of white, straight suits revelling in the "just" punishment of a woman.
In going straight to Wise, I've rather buried the usual lead of discussion regarding I Want to Live!; Susan Hayward won her Best Actress Oscar on her fifth nomination here, for her turn as real life murderess Barbara Graham. Wise's pictures were usually ensemble pieces, so the way just about everything in I Want to Live! cedes itself to Hayward is quite remarkable. It's the only way the film can work on the level it needs too, though; the audience needs to throw their lot in with Barbara and believe in her innocence for the film's message to resonate.
The fact that the overwhelming evidence against Graham led even Hayward herself to later admit she believed the woman to be guilty is irrelevant. Nelson Gidding's script is based on Pulitzer Prize winner Ed Montgomery's articles about the case, and the journalist is second lead here, played rather dryly by Simon Oakland in his film debut (he would collaborate with Wise again for West Side Story). Montgomery was in part responsible for Graham's incredible demonisation by the press and for extensive efforts to repeal her death sentence. Some seven years behind Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, the film can hardly be seen as eerily prescient in its depiction of the sensationalist power of the press, but the alarming proximity of the media to the case, at least as depicted here, seems almost parodic. Wise films news reports on television screens almost in their entirety, as if the cameraman is glued to the unfolding events.
The film's stylistic shifts work awkwardly against it, despite their individual proficiency, as they separate Hayward's performance into different modes of womanhood - thereby collapsing Barbara Graham as a complete character. We begin in a jazz club, camera askew on canted angles to signify the moral decrepitude of the milieu and lifestyle. Narrative soon interrupts the unpredictable rhythms of the jazz combo, as we meet Barbara in a hotel room above, her liaison with a New Jerseyman interrupted by police. It's a striking introduction to Hayward, who I'd never encountered before; somehow she has fostered her own 'brand' of picture that had led me to avoid what sounded like a preaching, blunt inflection to a whole career.
Instead, Hayward is pleasingly, if a little too simply, tough and full of sass; she cuts straight to an understanding of how Barbara has a low but realistic sense of her social standing. Later, this translates into a brassy rebellion to her voice and a steely, resistant glare, as the film tracks Barbara's prolonged fight against her death sentence. It's a rather one note performance, but it's at least a robust note that tussles admirably with the film's visual manipulation of her character. From the implicit moral judgement of her life as a prostitute, gambler and con-woman, the film is forced to turn her into a matronly, motherly figure by means of costume and cinematography, lest a 1950s audience sympathise with an unvirtuous woman.
I Want to Live! ultimately betrays Wise's prioritisation of his cause above character, which should really be working in harmony. The film whirls through the early scenes, speeding through landmark events like marriage and childbirth, as if Barbara's life is preordained and her attempts at happiness a generic disaster. There's still a whole quarter of the film's running time remaining as we enter Barbara's final hours, and though the ponderous reenaction of the execution routine was obviously politically powerful, it now plays out with increasing fatigue, pushing Barbara's emotional state into the background. Instead it's life and death that hangs in the balance, a delicate, tense collection of portmanteau shots, things and people that decide Barbara's face.
This is not a film that was made to be watched in the future.
Writing this in Britain, where capital punishment hasn't been legal since 1973, it seems an extraordinarily antiquated film, yet its message has still not had the full effect in the USA. Films like Dead Man Walking and Werner Herzog's documentary Into the Abyss continue the argument against the death sentence, but I Want to Live!, for all its faults, still rings with anger and pain against a situation it knows to be wrong. Wise's dedication and restraint from pushing too hard at the potential histrionics makes for a film that belies its curio status.