A late film noir – dating to the same year as Orson Welles’
era-closing Touch of Evil – I Want to Live (1958) comes from an age
of noir that has had the time to reflect upon itself, but hasn’t begun talking
about itself yet, not in the way the neo-noir does. Like most film noir, I Want To Live! bridges more than one
genre: in this case, the melodrama and the political or social problem film.
The film’s political agenda comes even before the film’s noir: as oppose to the previously discussed Yield to the Night (1956), I
Want to Live! insists on its factual origins. At the start (and end) of the
film, we are grandly told, via panel, that we are about to see something that
is more than a feature – a kind of document, a testament even, based on the
documents gathered by a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and the letters of the
actual Barbara Graham, the film’s protagonist.
This gives the impression of the singularity of not only
Barbara Graham’s case – which it certainly has, though Graham’s innocence is
not debated in the film – but also of Graham’s demise. There is an
uncomfortable emphasis on the innocence of the accused, as if her innocence
were to make her eventual execution all the more unjust, bizarre, and
nightmarish. It’s a different approach from Yield
to the Night (with a heroine who is not only guilty of murder but also has
no regrets), the kind that hints at corniness but becomes, probably
unintentionally, all-emotion – manipulative and operatic. I found I Want to Live! almost frustrating after
Yield to the Night’s sobriety and
poetry. In hindsight, though, I Want to
Live! feels oddly pure, maybe because of its age: in a life after
Fassbinder, anything manipulative can be fondly, even willingly, revisited.
There is glamour and morbidity in such a film. It’s good drama. Essentially, as
my Grandpa used to say – it is “a good movie experience”, though its political
potency has become just a little obsolete.
After asserting itself as something more than melodrama (a
political action, an informative document, an orientation) the film deliciously
slides into the murky world of noir. The first half hour of the film is steeped
in dark jazz, crime, lies, and underworld. Its harsh, expressionist realism is
mixed with the displaced old-artifice of Susan Hayward’s fierce, loud-yet-vulnerable
performance as Graham, and the tough lines she delivers. Graham’s character is
met after she has already fallen from grace. Ellipses and hints point to a biography
in which she never even fell from grace, but was born far away from it. There
is something mythic, even archaic about the depiction of Hayward as Graham. She
becomes a reflection of the woman played.
As a criminal, she is always in motion, always brassy, always snapping back;
yet she gives in willingly and acknowledges that in a world of men, she doesn’t
really stand a chance (the existential limits of life and justice, even, seem
to be lined by men or women who serve men). As a prison inmate she covers the
epitome of the Hollywood bad girl: having lost her way, she is now
missing out on the “good life” (something all women in women’s prison films do
– though as different as the women I have discussed till now might be, they all
seem to long for the same kind of “good life”: romantic stability, a household
and family, high esteem – be it as a conservative or simply to “be cool”),
missing out on family life and conservative values, missing out on what’s
“fun”. When Graham receives her final death row cell, she angers the matrons by
playing records, smoking, and, most importantly, wearing “provocative” lingerie
(“Oh boy,” says Graham, “Would I love to have somebody to provoke!”). Film
being what it is, objects speak of life. In an occult fashion, they channel
souls and dreams, even desire. They are the last remnant of normalcy in a
system that stands apart from life. Even ritual, the organization of life, is parodied
into an everlasting scene preparing Graham’s execution.
Women tend to be shed of their outside world fashion in
Women’s Prison Films; Barbara Graham, the real woman, had a thing for her
appearance (or rather, the outside world had a thing for her having a thing for
appearances) and thereby becomes a perfect vehicle for a Hollywood actress (see
the essay by Dennis Bingham).
A gruesome, provocatively feminist aspect of the film is the
execution and what leads up to it. With its endless preparation, the finale is
about twenty-seven minutes long and culminates in a sequence in which Hayward,
wearing earrings and a black sleeping mask, is gassed in front of an absurdly
large group of men watching through the windows of the gas chamber. Hayward’s
physical beauty and attire, even the odd prettiness of the makeshift-sleeping
mask, add to the perversion of the moment. Graham’s character doesn’t want to
see the men staring and so she doesn’t seem to, but the viewer watches them
stare. It becomes crucial that the scene is not a documentary, but a
re-enactment, that the woman watched is not Graham, but Hayward. Of course the
viewer is now sickeningly complicit: it is one of those uncomfortable and
subversive things cinema does, making us witnesses and observers in the
destruction of pretty things.
Recommended
reading:
Dennis Bingham, "I Do Want to Live!":
Female Voices, Male Discourse, and Hollywood Biopics,
