Bored Housewife
Crime of Passion (1957) shows the late-period noir film curdling, warping, tarnishing, the process that would climax the following year with the gothic grotesque of Touch of Evil and the pop-art, pulp neo-brutalism of Kiss Me Deadly. Here, narrative already runs a poor second to madness, delirium, an oppressive restlessness and an accusatory anger that points one big finger everywhere at once.
Barbara Stanwyck, near the end of the shelf life Hollywood allotted her as leading lady, but still magnificent, plays a smart journalist pushed around by her editor, a man whose face seems to be literally melting off his skull in great globby folds, his dialogue emerging barely coherent from between liquifying rubber lips. He must smell of burning tires and grain alcohol.
Stanwyck stands her ground, though. And she jokingly suggests using her Miss Lonelihearts column to tell a teenager to run away, not with her married lover, but with his wife. Brackets exclamation point brackets.
She also gets pushed around by detective Royal Dano, that scarecrow-skeleton figure, dowling limbs dangled from cheekbones like axe-blades, but falls for the stiff’s partner, big old Sterling Hayden. On their first date she tells him she never plans to marry, but on their second date, so it seems (the movie moves FAST) she marries him.
Now she’s in hell, deprived of the job that gave her purpose, unable to spend time with her husband alone due to the demands of his work, and surrounded by awful cop wives, whose dialogue is presented as a whirligig of echoed banalities, cut into blipvert frenzy close shots by director Gerd Oswald, a gifted hack from TV (lots of sharp expressive work on The Outer Limits). Oswald pushes everything to a hallucinatory extreme, but Stanwyck pushes back and claws out some credibility for an unbelievable character.
Jo Eisinger
Screenwriter Jo Eisinger worked on Gilda and Night and the City: he was no stranger to ambiguity and shadow. Bored to insanity, Stanwyck starts plotting like a femme fatale Lady Macbeth for her husband’s advancement. Manipulating the detectives, their wives and the chief, she orchestrates fights, humiliations, and an affair with the boss (Raymond Burr: what heights of passion those two must scale!). And then suddenly it’s murder too.
It makes little sense that this competent woman would even find herself in this situation, let alone disintegrate so rapidly if she did, but reason and plausibility are not the film’s central concerns. We accept that being the smartest person in the room would be intolerable for Stanwyck, whose big-but-nuanced performance (she never chews the scenery without smelling and licking it first), and the film uses a touch of expressionist hyperbole to make us feel her intolerable situation. But her devious, yet inconsistent and reckless machinations come out of left field, prefigured only by a couple fo corny lines about how women are disproportionately liable to go nuts and kill somebody out of an excess of emotion. The film tries to sympathise with Stanwyck and side with her patriarchal oppressors at the same time.
So it’s, um, not a great film, but it’s absolutely fascinating: the old way of making movies is in slow collapse, stars and studios crumbling, the thriller genre caught straddling drifting tectonic plates of tabloid realism and pulp lunacy (then colour would come in and thrillers would leap headfirst into glamor, exoticism and romance). Nobody involved knows how to make this film, but they all handle bits of it with bravura skill. Watching it, you feel like you have narcolepy and have missed about an hour of intersticial character and plot detail that might make sense of it all.
by David Cairns