MADEINUSA (Claudia Llosa, 2006)

Imagine a three-day festival during which God doesn’t exist and folk can therefore bust loose, indulging all kinds of behavior that are otherwise forbidden because of God’s all-seeing eyes. Mostly, people simply celebrate the release from moral scrutiny rather than take malicious advantage of it; but I do not know enough about Peruvian Indian tradition and ritual to know whether such a thing as “Holy Time” exists. However, writer-director Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa has enough of an ethnographic air about it to convince, and in any case the idea of expunging God, of all beings, from a “holy” celebration tickles my fancy as it skirts incredibly poor taste. Something about all this reminds me of the beggars’ rampage, which includes mischief, looting and rape, in Luis Buñuel’s great Viridiana (1961)—but in rough-hewn color rather than rough-hewn black and white.

Context counts; so it should be noted that the God who is briefly rendered blind and mute is the Christian God (specifically, the Roman Catholic one), and that the festivities appear to be a perversion of Easter (Good Friday through Easter Day) and, hence, a symbolical, theatrical sloughing-off of the faith of European conquerors and missionaries that was imposed on the ancestors of the indigents who live in Manataycuna, the fictional backward village where life is as bleak as it is rough, and where the film is set. “Manataycuna,” which means “the town that no one can enter,” seems aimed at protesting the colonialist invasion. The three-day holiday is, then, a “what if . . .”—what if we had been left alone by Europe to live our own lives. But with this wrinkle: because these people historically were invaded (by Spaniards in the sixteenth century), taken over, enslaved and converted, the protesting event is itself bedecked in Christian artifacts and images. The raucous singing and dancing of villagers in the dead dark that is lit up by rudimentary fireworks takes the form of a celebratory circle suggesting simultaneously the Peruvian indigents’ imprisonment and their protest against that imprisonment. It is rare to uncover a fictional film that is as anthropological as this one is.

Llosa’s raw, visually dazzling film, with its eye-opening closeups, of hands at work as well as faces, comes from Peru and Spain. When we are introduced to its protagonist, a pretty teenager, she is spreading rat poison all around her father’s house, along the way picking up a large dead rat by the tail and flinging it aside, her hands protected by plastic bags—makeshift gloves that suggest how resourceful these people have to be just to survive. This girl’s name is Madeinusa—pronounced mad-ay-NOO-sa, but a play on “Made in U.S.A.”: a reference to the region’s ongoing neo-colonialist (well, neo-neo-colonialist) exploitation by the “civilized” world, now headquartered in the U.S. rather than in Spain.

Madeinusa and her sister, Chale, live with their father, Manataycuna’s mayor, Cayo, a coarse, heavy-set man whom we watch impressing her into incest in the bed that both his daughters share. Sadly, Chale interprets their father’s sexual abuse of Madeinusa as a rejection of herself, an impediment to her father’s love, and treats Madeinusa accordingly. The girls are motherless, their mother having run off to Lima, the family legend goes, years earlier; we wonder, though, since this proves a drama of family murder, whether Cayo in fact killed his wife and disposed of the body. In any case, Madeinusa holds on to two keepsakes that memorialize her absent parent: a pair of multicolored glass earrings that suggest stained glass in an elaborate church; the legacy of a dream—flight to the city, Lima. The latter encapsulates escape, freedom, independence more than it does reunion with the lost mother. Yet both motives participate in Madeinusa’s pursuit of Holy Time’s prize for a daughter of the village: her anointment as the Virgin Mary during the three-day carnival. Indeed, Madeinusa wins the prize for her beauty and presumed virtue, pricking her sister’s jealousy with yet another thorn. Within the confines of Manataycunan life, it is a way for her to become, in a sense, her own mother.

Cayo’s mind is invested in Holy Time more than it is in the normal practice of faith during the rest of the year, another sign that what we are witnessing is an allegory about indigent Peru’s chafing under the yoke of the faith that was historically imposed on Incan Peru by force. How do we know about this “mental investment” of his? Cayo’s locked attic is a storehouse of religious artifacts from Holy Times past. At one point a panning camera of the crammed-full space suggests a clutter of idolatry, but in fact its expanse of theft, a ransacking of the non-native faith, projects Cayo’s possessiveness, hence, power. It is, he unconsciously feels, a just compensation for his harsh, even ruinous life.

I have not mentioned the film’s other major character, Salvador, a tall, handsome young man who stands out on many scores; Salvador is educated (a geologist, in fact), a stranger from the big city, Lima, and someone who is passing through Manataycuna rather than stuck there. Salvador also is not a dark-skinned Indian; he is white. Salvador takes a shine to Madeinusa—a threat to Cayo’s control of his family, indeed Cayo’s sense of some control over the circumstances of his life, and another occasion for Chale’s jealousy, cruelty and spite. Salvador promises to take Madeinusa back with him to Lima, by way of the truck, come back round, in which he hitchhiked his way into Manataycuna. (Salvador is monstrously unfeeling about what is, after all, Madeinusa’s sustaining dream. He gives her this blasé reason for taking her: “Why not?”) Meanwhile, Cayo is determined to thwart Salvador’s intrusion into his domain, even going so far as locking up Salvador. In the end, Salvador falls victim to a spontaneous religious ritual; he is scapegoated for a crime he did not commit—and yet, symbolically, perhaps did commit. His anointment as victim looms as a displaced revenge for Spain’s having conquered Peru.

I have seen a lot of movies in my time, but few have conveyed this powerfully the sense that people are locked into dead-end lives and cannot call these lives their own. Thus we feel to the bone Madeinusa’s drive to find a way out. It is in this context that her ultimate taunt of her sister weighs in most poignantly; Madeinusa threatens Chale with not taking her along at such time as she manages to get out of town. In the end, Madeinusa makes good on her threat. Ironically, a specter crosses our minds: Madeinusa will fail in Lima, perhaps succumbing to the streets. Was this her mother’s fate?

This is Llosa’s first feature and it is wonderful—coarse, vulgar, vivid, at times visually and emotionally spectacular. For me, it thins out toward and at the end, its heady sense of determimism submitting too comfortably and easily to a predetermined script. For most of its length, however, the film could not be more full of life as life is actually lived by too many of the planet’s people—lives under the thumb of history and of social, political and economic forces not of their making or choosing, and beyond their control. Madeinusa penetrates and convincingly shoulders the burden of history.

At the Mar del Plata Film Festival, Madeinusa was named best Latin American film.

GIDEON OF SCOTLAND YARD (John Ford, 1958)

T.E.B. Clarke adapted John Creasy’s first Gideon novel, Gideon’s Day, providing visiting Yank John Ford with an opportunity to make the film. Jack Hawkins shrewdly plays Inspector George Gideon, who is followed throughout the course of a single day, during which he misses dinner and his daughter’s onstage celloing but solves or resolves a string of criminal cases into the wee hours. One of Ford’s signal accomplishments is the balance his elegant, rambunctious film strikes between the chaos and confusion in which his hero and Scotland Yard cohorts seem to operate and the air of justifiable competence and wit that especially Gideon brings to the practice of police work.
     Ford, who directed The Informer (1935), shows here another police informant, a weasily though endearing cockney (Cyril Cusack, who gives the film’s most wonderful performance), whose life is in jeopardy, occasioning an incisively (rather than messily) thrilling chase. Abetted by cinematographer Frederick A. Young, moreover, Ford conjures voluminous fog that’s as haunting and eerily dangerous in color as the earlier film’s fog was in black and white.
     Anna Massey plays Gideon’s daughter, Sally. Early on, Ford’s camera lingers as Raymond Massey’s lovely daughter and Ford’s own godchild walks up steps, outdoors. This is a shot that will captivate men. Later in the film, another teenaged girl is shown walking upstairs indoors, the camera recording her observance by someone who has insinuated himself into her mother’s house, a sexual psychotic who will rape and murder her. The earlier shot of Sally implicates us in the sick man’s compulsion, stretching thin the line between “normality” and “perversion.” How I love John Ford!
     Meanwhile, Sally’s spirit and independence mark a generational change from her mother, Gideon’s cheerfully submissive wife.
     An Irish film, this, despite the London setting.

FULL MOON IN PARIS (Eric Rohmer, 1984)

Les nuits de la pleine lune—literally, Nights of the Full Moon—is the fourth entry in Eric Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs. This one is illustrative of a “country proverb”: “He who has two women loses his soul. He who has two houses loses his mind.” The “he” in this instance is a “she,” and indeed the film shows that both women and men share similar feelings of anxiety and vulnerability in sexual relationships. Arts graduate Louise and bureaucrat Rémi take turns being jealous, with Rémi’s jealousy confronting Louise’s air of being above such feelings. Choosing to divide her time between the place she shares with Rémi in Marne and her own apartment in Paris, Louise reassures her partner, telling him that she will remain faithful but sometimes needs time alone, and that he might find someone he loves more than he loves her. When Rémi confesses to having done just that, however, Louise disintegrates, especially since, after a night with band member Bastien, she has decided to dedicate her time to their shared life together. Louise makes all these decisions unilaterally.
     Someone else is constantly jealous: Louise’s married friend Octave. Bastien unnerves Octave, who asks Louise, “How can you grant others what you deny me?”
     We behave according to our feelings and our attempts to rein these in. The titular moon is irrelevant.
     Another Rohmer marvel of insight into human relations, the comedy is beautifully acted. One recalls that Rohmer never directed Jean-Pierre Léaud; Fabrice Luchini’s delightfully self-absorbed writer, Octave, allows him to do so by spirited proxy. But the film’s centerpiece is Pascale Ogier’s not-on-top-of-things-though-pretending-to-be Louise (best actress, Venice). Bulle Ogier’s daughter died of a heart attack the year of the film’s release, just one day short of her twenty-sixth birthday.

THE DEFIANT ONES (Stanley Kramer, 1958)

Compact, clear, niftily edited and formally, at times, breathtakingly beautiful, The Defiant Ones, about racial brotherhood, has stood the test of time. Certainly, unlike nearly every other film by producer-director Stanley Kramer, it hasn’t become a target of critical derision. Nevertheless, because of the extent and depth of that derision, it may be necessary to remind ourselves that Kramer was once highly regarded. Even those, like Pauline Kael, who proved themselves prophetic by deriding Kramer at the height of his popularity, I might add, conceded that The Defiant Ones was the best film that Kramer directed. (More famous are some films that Kramer produced before becoming a director, for instance, 1952’s High Noon—Bill Clinton’s favorite movie—and 1954’s The Caine Mutiny, highlighted by Humphrey Bogart’s ferociously paranoid Captain Queeg.) I will have something to say about how much of the film Kramer is likely to have actually directed; but there can be little doubt that the finished piece in this case is something to reckon with. The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best English-language film of 1958.

Here is a likeable and very moving film, even if it lacks the existential dimension that its dramatic material seems to cry out for. The Defiant Ones is nearly as good as John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as both a physical and a moral adventure. I love the latter more; Treasure has something more to give—among other things, the existential dimension that Kramer’s film lacks. But The Defiant Ones warrants being placed in the same esteemed company.

Nedrick Young’s story is bone-bare simple. (Blacklisted, Young is credited under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas. He and Harold Jacob Smith won richly deserved Oscars for their story and screenplay.) In the contemporary rural south, two violent convicts, John “Joker” Jackson and Noah Cullen, escape at night when the truck transporting them to a lockup facility overturns in a storm. One white, the other black, they are shackled to each other; they hate one another because of their racial difference. However, their flight from authorities that are searching for them can succeed only if they work together toward their common goal of freedom. By degrees, necessity tempers their discord, and they find harbor with a widow with a small son. They sever the chain bounding each to the other. When Jackson discovers that Cullen has been set up for death in a swamp by the widow who offers him alone a chance to flee with her into a new life, he is torn. The emotional bond that has grown between him and Cullen dictates his moral decision to attempt to save Cullen’s life. The two are caught.

One of the greatest failures of current commercial U.S. cinema is in the area of plot, which in film after film there is simply too much of. The Defiant Ones reminds us that this wasn’t always the case. The one aspect where, in this regard, Kramer’s film may be faulted, though, is the parallel action of the hunt for the two escapees, which sporadically, and somewhat irritatingly, interrupts the main thrust of the narrative. On the other hand, this material isn’t irrelevant. Jurisdictional dissension in the ranks of the hunters ironically reflects on similar divisions in the debate over the issue of civil rights in the nation, and I can’t recall a more accurate portrayal of one aspect of the southern personality: slyness and alertness just below the surface of seeming laziness. In more ways than one, while watching this film you feel the heat.

It’s surprising how many themes The Defiant Ones brings into concert. One is racial hatred as a divider of humanity. Another refers to the source of this hatred: society, which by imposing this hostility has thus divided each of the two criminals against himself. The third theme is implicit in the second: there is, buried in each man, a capacity to grow beyond the societal imposition; there’s a spark of humanity in both main characters that’s attuned to their commonality. The fourth theme is implicit in the third: the racial divisiveness within the larger community, even the nation, is capable of radical solution through whatever means, including laws, that can “undivide” individuals by pressuring each to find, to feel, the inner spark of humanity that society has harshly suppressed. Society can redeem itself. At the conclusion of the film we aren’t sorry that the two men have been captured, because the film in no way obscures the fact that these are criminals who pose a real threat to society. At the same time, we are elated at the small victory for us all insofar as the two men have bonded across the trench of race that society has dug so deep. Their impetus has been the freedom both of them coveted but are ultimately willing to risk losing in favor of their new bond of friendship and tolerance. The allusion to Jean Renoir’s great La grande illusion (1937)—the passage involving the peasant girl—refers to the theme of freedom, so much at the heart of the Renoir masterpiece, that comprises the Kramer film’s other themes. The Defiant Ones thus makes this implicit statement: For America to be truly free, it must overcome its racial prejudice and divides. It’s rare for a Kramer film to have an idea, as distinct from a message, but this one is intellectually alive and bristlingly suggestive.

Although there’s a trace of speechifying in the parallel action of the hunt, the main action, the flight of the convicts, is blissfully free of any taint of this. The ideas generated are contained in the action itself and in the mise-en-scène. The dialogue, expert, cuts like a knife. While they are chained together, Jackson pulls Cullen out of a swamp; when Cullen thanks him (the first positive sentiment that has passed between them), Jackson retorts with absolute conviction that he wasn’t dragging Cullen out of danger but keeping Cullen from dragging him in. This encapsulates the two’s whole immediate predicament, while at the same time preparing us for one of the film’s many echoes: when, later, Jackson heads for another swamp in order to rescue Cullen again, but this time unselfishly, by choice. Near the end, Jackson and Cullen try escaping by train. Cullen has jumped on and extends his hand to Jackson, who is running on the ground. The shot, of the white hand desperately reaching for the black one, is, to say the least, thrilling, and the furiousness of the pace, dictated by the speed of the train, again contains the film’s “message” in the sheer physicality of the action. Too, the image reverberates, because the attempted linkage of the hands—and the emotional bond, which this implies, that we cannot see—has replaced the chain that once physically bound them. Ultimately, Cullen tumbles off the train, and it’s impossible to know whether he has lost his footing, Jackson has inadvertently pulled him off, or, in failing to grab and lift Jackson up into the open train, he has opted to reunite with Jackson on the ground. The ambiguity is entirely justified because it doesn’t matter which is the case, and it doesn’t matter because no resentment passes between them, in either direction, as a result. Thus in this instance the film makes its point not by what we see and hear but by what we don’t see and hear: the scowls and well-voiced enmity that earlier passed between them. At that point, stunningly, the train that has left both of them behind echoes as a metaphor for the humane and moral distance that these two souls have traveled in the course of the film.

Moreover, the mise-en-scène is decisive for clarifying the film’s issues. The daunting trees, the treacherous terrain, the gaping swamps below: all these are correlative to the forces arrayed against the two men, in terms of their ability both to elude authorities and to come together as escapees and, finally, as men. The visual irony is exquisite; for here, freshly and unexpectedly, gorgeous, dangerous, ravenous Nature—the wilds—refers to human nature, society, the immoral education that society provides its members on the issue of race, and all the dangers for society and its individuals that this “education” generates.

Not to be churlish but at least accurate, there’s so much action in this film, all of which holds the film back from becoming the kind of blatantly preachy thing that we associate with Kramer films (Not As a Stranger, Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), that we must wonder just how responsible Kramer is for the fine outcome. Usually, “action stuff” in a Hollywood film is handled by assistant directors or the production’s second unit. Paul Helmick is the credited assistant director (another assistant director, Clem Beauchamp, is listed as the production manager), and it’s likely that he directed much, if not most, of the film. When one compares The Defiant Ones to its immediate predecessor in the Kramer œuvre, the lumbering, ridiculous The Pride and the Passion (1957), one must say either that Kramer learned a great deal from that fiasco or that someone else directed The Defiant Ones. Kramer’s subsequent films insist that the latter is the case. (Not until 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World would a Kramer film rely so heavily on assistants and the second unit.) Regardless, we can be certain that Kramer himself directed the “dialogue scenes,” for instance, the discussions between the two men leading the efforts to recapture the escapees, and the exchanges between Jackson and the widow. Though not without merit, these are the film’s weakest scenes.

Indeed, a considerable part of the film’s artistic success is owed to two other contributors: Kramer’s loyal cutter, Frederic Knudtson, and his black-and-white cinematographer, Sam Leavitt, who won an Oscar, again richly deserved, for his work here.

Most of the acting in the film is satisfactory. In the supporting cast, Cara Williams (screwy Gladys in TV’s Pete and Gladys, the spin-off of December Bride, where we never saw her character) is especially good as the lonely, cold-hearted widow, who, like Curley’s wife in John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, goes unnamed. The two lead performances are marvelous—rock solid and intense. Tony Curtis, the Johnny Depp-pretty boy of his day, loses every trace of his familiar personality (not to mention those fulsome curly locks of his) for the role of Joker Jackson, a man embittered nearly to the bone, the film implies, because his poverty leaves his whiteness as his one defense against identifying, hence bonding, with oppressed blacks. As Cullen, Sidney Poitier (best actor, Berlin, British Academy) is, if anything, even better. Like Curtis, Poitier pulled himself together for his best role, almost erasing memories of his flimsy earlier work in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (1950) and Zoltan Korda’s Cry the Beloved Country (1951)—both estimable films, and, while Poitier flailed, terrifically acted by Richard Widmark and Canada Lee. Cullen, in The Defiant Ones, is an authentic character, not at all the bland image of the Negro that liberal whitewash would turn Poitier’s screen persona into. Both actors are thoroughly believable in their mutual hatred and disregard, and both succeed in detailing the intricate transformation their characters undergo. I revisited this film precisely to note these transformations, in the wake of seeing for the first time Boaz Yakin’s glossy, worthless Remember the Titans (2000), in which white and black kids who hate one another end up loving one another, but with only the sketchiest explanation given for the change—an unconscionable film for the real American racial issues it toys with and demeans.

Poitier and Curtis, by contrast, help keep The Defiant Ones attuned to a difficult, challenging reality, a persistent chord of truth.

I WANT TO LIVE! (Robert Wise, 1958)

Susan Hayward, “the Brooklyn Bernhardt,” seemed to arrive at her career peak playing singer-actress Lillian Roth in I’ll Cry Tomorrow (Daniel Mann, 1955), for which she was named best actress at Cannes, but she surpassed this celebrated work as another actual personage, Barbara Graham, whom the state of California executed for murder in 1955, in I Want to Live!, for which she won (after four previous nominations) the Oscar, the New York Film Critics Circle’s prize, the Golden Globe, the Laurel Award, and best actress at the Mar del Plata Film Festival. The film argues Graham’s innocence, and Hayward’s spirited, incandescent performance accounts for much of the film’s riveting nature. However, its cumulative indictment of a biased and imprecise system of justice also contributes to the film’s powerful effect.

Graham, a “good-time girl,” is shown arrested for prostitution and convicted and imprisoned on a charge of perjury, having provided a false alibi for two criminals, two “nice guys,” as she puts it—a crime that, ironically, establishes her loyalty and decency as well as her recklessness. “Nice guys,” in Barbara Graham’s book, are those who are friendly and treat her decently, that is to say, do not slap her or beat her up. The film, unfortunately, provides little motive for her prostitution; the implicit one, of course, is economic, but Hayward, gorgeous and (in the accepted mainstream Hollywood style of the day) almost perpetually glamorous, cannot help also implying that Graham might have attained more wholesome employment. (Hayward is not the sort of actress who loses herself in a part, and Graham is more or less transformed into Susan Hayward in order for the film to make its case.*) Nevertheless, Graham forsakes her loose lifestyle once she marries for the fourth time and “settles down.” The couple have a child. Unfortunately, Graham’s spouse, a drug addict, abandons her, and, despite her parole restrictions, this brings her into renewed contact with two hoodlums from her past.

In 1953 these men rob and bludgeon to death a disabled widow in her Burbank home. The mastermind of the two plots to pin the actual killing on Graham, who was home with her spouse and baby at the time. His thinking is this: the state would never execute the mother of a young child and, therefore, if Graham is characterized as the one who committed the murder, the state also would not execute those who merely participated in the robbery with her. This man’s accomplice is a bully whom Graham once turned down for a date. When Graham inadvertently leads the police to the men’s hideout, her fate is sealed. The two men conspire to make Graham their accomplice and to pin the actual killing on her. Not a shred of physical evidence exists to tie Graham to the crime scene.

Graham’s court-appointed attorney is incompetent in at least two ways. He tells her repeatedly that her legitimate alibi is inadequate to save her life. As a result, desperate, Graham walks into a trap for the purposes of establishing a different alibi, wherein the man providing it, unbeknownst to her, is an undercover police officer. In a Baglioni moment, when the fraudulent alibi is exposed in court, the lawyer turns against his client for having lied to him, although he himself is the one who pressured her into the lie. (Baglioni: See Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”) Thereafter, he neither trusts his client nor believes in her innocence. During the trial, one of her co-defendants provides eyewitness testimony of Graham’s having beaten the victim to death using her right hand. It turns out that Graham is left-handed, but the discrepancy passes both Graham’s attorney’s notice and her own. In the American system of justice, where procedure takes precedence over justice and the actual determination of guilt or innocence, Graham has no recourse to an appeal of the jury’s guilty verdict and the death sentence imposed on her on the grounds of the co-defendant’s likely perjured testimony because it could have been pointed out at trial that Graham wasn’t right-handed. Only it wasn’t; so Graham must suffer the fatal consequences of dull legal representation. A psychiatric evaluation reveals, further, that she is incapable of such a violent crime, but this proves equally unhelpful. Nor does a series of articles, homing in on her likely innocence, by Edmund Montgomery, of the San Francisco Chronicle, accomplish anything more than possibly changing public opinion. Eventually, after a grueling series of appeals and stays of execution, Barbara Graham is gassed to death by the state.

The script by Nelson Gidding and Don M. Mankiewicz is sharp; Robert Wise’s direction, less so. Wise, the hack who would direct The Sound of Music (1965) and most of West Side Story (1961), holds many shots way too long and strenuously, and misguidedly, applies a Wellesian technique—this, from the man who launched his directorial career at Orson Welles’s expense in the early 1940s. The cutter of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Wise is witheringly exposed by actress Joan Fontaine in her autobiography, No Bed of Roses; apparently the fool timed scenes with a stopwatch! (The film in question is 1957’s Until They Sail—the one Wise made just prior to making I Want to Live!) One constantly feels while watching I Want to Live! that Wise is struggling through his direction of it, more focused on the film’s message against capital punishment than on the more pressing matters of achieving formal integrity and expressiveness. On the other hand, Wise succeeds admirably in one regard. The film is divided into two parts, the first focusing on Graham’s life, including the murder trial, and the second focusing on her life in prison while she awaits execution, and then the execution itself, whose technical details are given, quite effectively, near documentary attention. Surely it is not the most persuasive argument against capital punishment that innocent persons are sometimes put to death. Yet the first part of the film could have been used as a set-up for just such a sentimental appeal. Rather, we no longer think about Graham’s guilt or innocence as we watch the film’s devastating second half. That seems secondary to the more salient issue: the state’s unbridled power in putting to death one of its citizens. Both the scenarists and Wise deserve credit for this outcome.

It is the Earl Warren U.S. Supreme Court that refused to save the life of Barbara Graham, despite her innocence of the crime for which she was convicted. More recently, the Burger and Rehnquist courts, on the issue of executions, have reversed the Warren court’s distribution of priorities, which favored the civil liberties of defendants over the efficiency, hence integrity, of the legal apparatus and procedure; hence, it is useless to say that, today, Barbara Graham would have been given a fairer shake. The opposite is true, unless the actions of the police would weigh in as impermissible. The stunt that the police pulled (I assume in concert with the district attorney’s office prosecuting the case, although the film never clarifies this) in entrapping Graham in a false alibi is the kind of thing, when played out in court, that ensures a jury’s condemnation and conviction of a defendant. One would think that an appeal would be won on this basis, at least remanding the defendant to a new trial, but one also would think that a left-handed person would never be executed for a right-handed murder. In the U.S., perhaps the watch phrase should be: Think again.

As nearly all of the civilized world has come to see, capital punishment is barbaric. Still, the fact of the matter is that Graham should not even have been incarcerated for murder, much less executed by the state. It is always a puzzlement to me when someone representing the law says on television, after someone wrongly imprisoned for years, even decades, is finally exonerated and released, “Well, the system worked.” It is horrific that someone should be put to death for a crime that he or she did not commit, but it is quite bad enough that such a soul should be merely stripped of his or her liberty. Why don’t more people in this country see this?

Its message is potent, but I Want to Live! lives for Hayward, the vibrant humanity of whose performance is unassailable. Hayward’s perhaps finest moment comes when, before being executed, Graham gives away her son’s toy tiger, explaining, “He has probably forgotten about it by now,” with the implied poignancy that Graham knows that he has also probably forgotten her by now, too. Hayward’s Graham is one of those remarkable instances when acting is nuanced and restrained and yet engagingly full-blown at the same time. Too, Lionel Lindon’s black-and-white cinematography shows off Hayward to emotionally spectacular advantage. If there is one criticism that can fairly be leveled at Hayward’s acting it is this: her Graham sometimes behaves inexplicably naively, given the immense amount of intelligence that the actress has invested in the character. On balance, Hayward falls just short of the achievement of Ginger Rogers in the thematically similar Roxie Hart (1942). Indeed, written by Nunnally Johnson and directed by “Wild Bill” Wellman, Roxie Hart provides a more complete and precise analysis of American justice than I Want to Live!—as does Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

* Hayward’s headline-making notoriety as a result of her recent messy divorce from actor Jess Barker helped blur the distinction between actress and character. Barker, whose career Hayward’s overshadowed, used to strip his wife and spank her—one of the lurid details of the couple’s homelife that helped cost Hayward the Oscar for I’ll Cry Tomorrow and, ironically, helped ensure her winning the trophy, at a safe, dignified distance of three years, for I Want to Live!