1956 Directed by Gerd Oswald
Kathy leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill, but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs. Her drive to advance Bill's career soon takes her down a dangerous path.
Barbara Stanwyck Sterling Hayden Raymond Burr Fay Wray Virginia Grey Royal Dano Robert Griffin Dennis Cross Jay Adler Stuart Whitman Malcolm Atterbury Robert Quarry Gail Bonney Joe Conley Ralph Brooks Larry Carr Jack Chefe Richard Collier Nan Dolan Madelon Erin Patricia Merlin Charles Perry Kenner G. Kemp Peg La Centra Joe Ploski Carl Sklover Cosmo Sardo Bert Stevens Geraldine Wall
A working woman’s solid and focused noir. One of the best moments comes early on with a montage of women reading the advice column of Kathy (Stanwyck) — from butch cabbies to women in nightclubs. There’s a feminist friction to this as Kathy struggles to adjust to her switch from writerly power player to housewife to Sterling Hayden’s detective. He lacks her ambition. “Is this what you have to look forward to? This mediocrity?” she asks in a breakthrough scene where Stanwyck is downright volcanic. The film doesn’t quite live up to the ideas Stanwyck’s performance makes clear about femininity as currency, ambition, and how American culture devalues women and their work as her character goes to extreme lengths to push her husband up the ladder at work. But it’s a worthwhile watch nonetheless.
In the 15 years after WWII, [the] mystique of feminine fulfillment became the cherished and self-perpetuating core of contemporary American culture. Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife ... Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands.
... The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made…
Barbara Stanwyck's reporter Is ambitious, smart and strong willed. She falls for Sterling Hayden's police detective, who is none of those things. Oh well, opposites attract I suppose. The theme of the movie is the dynamic between men and women in fifties society. Crime of Passion explores this by keeping all the focus on the central situation, as Stanwyck makes the uneasy transition from city career woman to suburban housewife. She's bored to tears by the banal conversations of her new contemporaries, resulting in several meltdowns, before she settles on scheming to advance her husband's career. The title suggests a certain inevitability to the whole thing, but it's an interesting ride getting there. The two central roles are perfectly cast…
TCM commenced their annual "Summer Under the Stars" festival today by devoting August 1's programming to the greatest of them all: Brooklyn's own Barbara Stanwyck. Since there was no "Noir Alley" offering for this Saturday night, I decided to revisit Stanwyck's work in Crime of Passion, a noir-adjacent drama that my parents had never seen. We all agree that it's a mixed bag, never quite selling the plausibility of the love triangle between Stanwyck, cop husband Sterling Hayden and his boss Raymond Burr (yet another Letterboxd entry with him today!), but what's compelling is how this 50s film discusses Stanwyck's frustration with being cooped up as a suburban housewife. Her hatred of traditional, heteronormative domestic roles and her ambition to…
Didn't exactly love this flawed noir, which has Barbara Stanwyck playing a femme fatale who doesn't start out as one at all. But I respect it a lot for its oddity and its uniqueness: It's about a successful journalist who gives up her career to marry a cop, then finds her ambition warped by the expectation that she should play housewife and socialite. It's about the limits on women's roles in the 1950s, but the moral is that those limits drive women… to murder (dun dun dun!!!) which seems a little histrionic. Also, I'm not sure who wouldn't be driven to murder by marriage to Sterling Hayden, who here seems like a sweet, dull chump.
This really starts with Babs saying, “Forget the man, run away with his wife!” It’s one of those Noiresque melodramas that uses gender inequality (specifically in marriage) as a sort of backdrop to illustrate the frustrations that motivate the central female character. Part of me is genuinely fascinated by this type of film because wow, even 1950s men could see the harm of patriarchal society norms. But I gotta admit this movie is a total mixed bag because unlike Barbara Stanwyck, it never knows what it wants.
Starts off as the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, becomes The Feminine Mystique, segues into Lady Macbeth, and finally ends up as, I don’t know, a medieval witch-burning? In other words, watching this movie is essentially watching the history of Second Wave feminism in reverse. The Sapphic-tinged, sisterhood-is-powerful messages fly fast and furious in the first 10 minutes, but then the ideological boom gets brought down really fast and really hard. Still, is it great fun to see Miss Stanwyck playing another fiery, man-manipulating, coulda-been, shoulda-been dyke? Does Kate McKinnon own a cat? (The answer is yes).
Advice columnist Kathy Ferguson becomes a bored housewife of an unambitious police officer in this uneven and scattered tale of disparaging discontentment, and its gradual descent to bloodstained bitterness. Using her job skills on real life scenarios, Kathy concocts a series of stories to indirectly manipulate the office politics and lickspittles in her husband’s workplace. Once this concoction fails to land her husband the highest position, she tries every avenue of influence until it takes her at a lawless driveway of seduction and coercion. Kathy treads on rigid gender expectations, where her career-driven nature (a supposed masculine trait) creates friction against her husband’s complacent disposition (a supposed feminine trait). Their different perceptions of success and satisfaction diverge from each other.…
Flawed, but with some interesting feminist themes that could have used greater exploration. Barbara Stanwyck plays a former career woman who sacrifices the rat race for love and marriage to a police detective played by Sterling Hayden. Relegated to domestic mediocrity, our ambitious heroine plays office politics from the sidelines on behalf of her unknowing husband (reminiscent of Beatrice Straight in the film version of Patterns from the same year), transforming herself into a double dealing femme fatale in the process. Has a muddled plot that plays like a B movie; though there’s some nice racy sexual innuendo. Those with textbook genre expectations will be left scratching their head, never quite a noir or a crime film and barely a soapy melodrama. German born Director Gerd Oswald usually brings interest to his features but is best remembered for his TV work, particularly on The Outer Limits.
Oh how I missed watching Stanwyck! I don’t know why it always takes me so long to get through an actor’s filmography even when I’m obsessed with them. I got so absorbed watching Stanwyck scheme and walk around men (and tables - god that party scene was a delight) like they are air while still digging a grave of her own. It’s delightful and I’ve yet to discover anyone who can perform in front of the camera with such ease. Her sly smile makes me giggle like an idiot and the anguish of Kathy is depicted with unbelievable sensibility, despite Kathy’s passionate and ambitious persona.
Crime of Passion’s battle is held in two camps: the workplace and the domestic arena.…
