I WANT TO LIVE! (1958)

Isn't that Helen Lawson??

R1 ....

Great movie

Thank you, R3.

Lionel Lindon's b&w cinematography is a thing of beauty, as in "The Manchurian Candidate".

R5 It really was. So rich and deep. Exquisite work.

Barbara’s Wikipedia page is pretty extensive. I’m skimming through it now.

It is a great film, helped by Hayward's performance and Robert Wise's direction. It's cold and clinical in its storytelling, which somehow manages to render it more emotionally compelling. I think it's one of Wise's best films, especially among his later work.

Graham could be pretty when dolled up and in the right angles.

The scenes where she is waiting for the governor’s office to call and she is so handwringly high strung and upset is so well done - love this movie. Didn’t Susan Blakey do a pale TV movie remake?

Are not is!!

R9 Lindsay Wagner did!

"The feel-good movie of the year!"

The only fault for me is when Hayward dances. She really can't dance and I think Wise tries to cover it by using a shot of her only from the waist up.

R13 The nerve!

R13 Bitch, we’re gonna fight. I LOVE that wild dance she does to the bongos. She’s everything in that scene. Fire.

"this film tells the true story of “brazen bad-girl” Heather Graham"

OP, you're obviously even drunker than I am.

This film has a superb jazz score by Johnny Mandel and Gerry Mulligan.

From Amazon.com review: A work of unrelenting intensity, 1958's I Want to Live stands as a benchmark of American film. Taking on a grab bag of then-taboo topics--prostitution, gambling, drug addiction--and presenting them in a morally ambiguous, unorthodoxly grim context, I Want to Live predated the "new Hollywood" revolution wrought by such films as Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider by nearly a decade. With its unprecedented all-jazz score, Live's music is no less trailblazing. A meta soundtrack of sorts, this collection actually functions as two LPs in one, documenting the performances of Gerry Mulligan's seven-piece band, who appears in the film, and the larger jazz ensemble underscore that sets the pace and tone for some of Live's most memorable scenes. While Mulligan's combo swings with characteristic cool, it's the ensemble pieces that really stun. Composer Johnny Mandel intentionally chose an odd array of lead instruments and linked all his compositions with an arsenal of percussion to add to the film's edge of your seat/edge of sanity allure. The achieved effect is by turns moody and impressionistic, deliberate and plodding. Whatever the mood, Live's clench on the listener is positively physical. --Matt Hanks

R16 Oh shit! 😂🤣😂🤣😂 I did not catch that and 15 posts in, no one else did either. You made my night, love.

::laughing my ass out of this thread::

But I will return.

R17 Yes, the score is everything.

Barbara Graham was a drug addict prostitute who participated in the bludgeoning of an old woman and the film to strengthen it's argument against capital punishment makes her innocent of the crime and presents her as a horribly sinned against and a noble, superior person. Hayward is guilty of over acting and goes through the same motions she displayed in I'll Cry Tomorrow, Where Love Has Gone and Valley of the Dolls. And yes she is fun to watch.

R20 Hayward added a trashy, streetwise veneer to her performance here that was not present in her other work. She was sublime.

As for Graham, I will have to confirm your claims with further research.

R21 You've seen the movie obviously. It's very sketchy regarding Barbara and her past. And that streetwise veneer is in Helen Lawson and the character she played in Where Love Has Gone. Hayward often came off as a tough broad.

The biggest flaw with the movie, (or so I read), is it's inaccuracy. Barbara Graham was guilty as sin! Susan Hayward said so herself in some old interview I read. The character she played was the one she read in the script.

Years ago, I thought that I had read that there was a grade z film made of Barbara Graham's story in which she was portrayed as guilty. I've never been able to find evidence of this movie since then. Anyone else?

Helen Lawson had to attend the Oscars with one of the fags she's usually stuck with.

R22 No dice.

Was it supposed to be a dark comedy? I'm laughing at her overacting now though.

I don't watch old films in black and white.

You're about to fly right on out of her, aren't you, OP?

R29 I haven’t “flown right on out of” anybody since I popped out of my mother’s cunt 30+ years ago.

😭😭😭😭

Who was Susan up against that year for the Oscar? Deborah Kerr for Separate Tables, Elizabeth Taylor for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rosalind Russell for Auntie Mame, and Shirley MacLaine for Some Came Running.

[quote] “brazen bad-girl” Heather Graham

R14 I think you’ll agree that this is the biggest god-damned Oh dear of the year.

R33 😂 It has been pointed out!

And yes, I agree.

r28...I hope you are being witty, otherwise, you are a fool.

R28 You're missing out on some fantastic films: Sunset Boulevard, Raging Bull, Schindler's List, The Battle of Algiers, The Miracle Worker, The Night of the Hunter, Kiss Me, Deadly...

[quote]Caterer: This is more moving than Susan Hayward's climatic speech in I Want To Live!

[quote]Blanche : You're ready to fly right out of here, aren't you?

[quote]Caterer: Well excuse me for living, Anita Bryant!

R37 Aw! Too cute!

The real person looks more like Gloria Grahame.

I can't believe it but didn't Carol Burnett do a parody of this? Considering it's a true story, that's kid of tasteless.

It's a good movie, I like Susan Hayward, it's probably her best performance. I used to like her more when I was a kid. She was talented, but I get tired of her tough act, it's always "you lissen to ME, mistuh". I thought she was exhausting in I'll Cry Tomorrow. I mean she was entertaining but the raw feelings, I'm not sure it's acting or her having a breakdown.

R39 She was exquisite in I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

Also, loved her in “Stolen Hours,” which is on YouTube.

R36 and besides The Night of the Hunter some other great horror flicks in b/w are The Haunting, Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents, The Blair Witch Project, Repulsion, Psycho and The Honeymoon Killers.

Citizen Kane

I grew up with the movie. Hayward did a fine job and the movie showcased many production talents.

Unfortunately, too much emphasis was placed on how it was "biographical." It is a fiction loosely based on the case, best considered as an independent story. Severed from its "poor troubled victim female and how dare they execute a lady but by all means gas the men" stink by making Hayward's character innocent, it's powerful melodrama.

Why feed the illiterate troll at R28? Or are the so-helpful respondents Frauen?

[quote] I don't watch old films in black and white.

I prefer her in My Foolish Heart (1949) - she conveys the young romance and older frustration and pain really well. It's my favorite movie of hers. The only film made from a J. D. Salinger story (Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut) and he didn't like it - never sold another story to movies.

June Allyson was originally supposed to star in I'll Cry Tomorrow...hear me out. Charles Walters, the original director, said he was was working on the role with her and she was going to be great showing the fragile, hopeful girl having her illusions destroyed - he said she was tougher than her image. Anyhow, Hayward got to Roth and wheedled the part away from June, and Walters quit.

Hayward was way too old for the part, and her histrionics were ridiculous.

A cartoonish performance.

Here Susan Hayward getting her Oscar from James Cagney and Kim Novak (who ought to have been nominated for Vertigo, in hindsight, and whose performance in that is more known now than Hayward's in I Want to Live).

R47 ...

[quote] Barbara Graham was a drug addict prostitute who participated in the bludgeoning of an old woman

I am in no way related to that cheap floozie

I also like her in The Lusty Men (1952) the rodeo movie with Robert Mitchum and Arthur Kennedy, directed by Nicholas Ray, and They Won't Believe Me (1947). the film noir also starring Robert Young, Jane Greer, and Rita Johnson. I guess I tend to like her in her less showy films. She was a favorite of my mom, she liked her in Snows Of Kilimanjaro, David And Bathsheba, etc.

“Thank God, we can all relax! Susie finally got what she’s been looking for for 20 years.”

R46 I may have been a drunk, but I always held it in.

Susan Hayward was my favorite for years. Until I read a few years ago somewhere that she was a homophobe.

I watched this with my mother, who clued me in to so many good films. What I most remember is her attorney, walking out into the public and turning off his hearing aid.

In one of his books, Ethan Mordden recalls seeing the movie's poster when he was growing up, with its view of Susan Hayward being strapped into the electric chair.

He says he imagined that it was his mother in the chair, and the movie was called I Want To Nag.

r50 Virginia--being a hairspray addict is also a serious issue.

[quote]Caterer: This is more moving than Susan Hayward's climatic speech in I Want To Live!

Oh, dear.

Hayward should have won in 1955 for "I'll Cry Tomorrow." It's a schmaltzy film, but she worked hard at the part, and was quite good in it. She also did all her own singing, and unlike Natalie Wood or Audrey Hepburn, she hated to sing; but of course has Charles Busch has pointed out, no one has ever had more more glamorous arm movements when they sing than Susan Hayward.

She lost to Anna Magnani in a weak film of one of Tennessee Williams's weakest plays, "The Rose Tattoo." Magnani is not necessarily great in the film , but she was such a legendary actress in European films (she is unforgettable in "Bellissima" and "The Golden Coach"), Hollywood wanted to reward her. I think they felt really bad about that afterwards, though, because that meant Hayward lost for a fifth time, and people respected how hard she worked at her acting, even if she wasn't the most talented actress in the world. So even though she was too old to play Barbara Graham, she still worked at it, and the Oscar was one for career-long respect (like Susan Sarandon's for "Dead Man Walking"--far from Sarandon's best role, but she was still quite fine and should have won before that).

[quote] In one of his books, Ethan Mordden recalls seeing the movie's poster when he was growing up, with its view of Susan Hayward being strapped into the electric chair.

Barbara Graham was strapped into a chair when the state killed her, but it was in the gas chamber--she was not electrocuted.

I prefer the 1940s Susan when she played softer but still like her later work too. I also prefer I'll Cry Tomorrow to I Want to Live, especially her drunk acting. Love the way she does those weird facial ticks as she walks down the street before falling over the trash cans.

I did it first.

[quote]Barbara Graham was strapped into a chair when the state killed her, but it was in the gas chamber--she was not electrocuted.

Meanwhile, they executed my sitcom after airing only one episode.

R63 You bitch.

😂

"Damn ya, damn ya, DAMN ya, DAMN YA....!!!"

I remember reading that she would have preferred to get her Oscar for I'll Cry Tomorrow.

"My name is Barbara, too". The nice San Quentin nurse.

"I would get someone like you, fatstuff!" to the San Quentin Matron. "And turn off that schmaltz!"

“I’ll sleep in the raw!”

R32 and Kim Stanley should have been nominated for The Goddess (1958). Hayward did win the Golden Globe and the NY Film Critics named her Best Actress.

Push-button control

She couldn't have hated it too much, r59, as she was Vegas/MAME. Or maybe she really needed the dough.

[italic] Kim Stanley should have been nominated for The Goddess (1958).[/italic]

Yes! It’s Jessica Lange’s favorite performance.

The Goddess is such a bleak affair.

PROVACATIVE?! HOW I WISH I HAD SOMEONE TO PROVOKE!

R74 But it’s so good.

[quote]She lost to Anna Magnani in a weak film of one of Tennessee Williams's weakest plays, "The Rose Tattoo." Magnani is not necessarily great in the film , but she was such a legendary actress in European films (she is unforgettable in "Bellissima" and "The Golden Coach"), Hollywood wanted to reward her.

"Hollywood wanted to reward her" - how the hell do you know what Hollywood wanted? Did they have meetings to decide to vote alike, to "reward" Anna Magnani for all her Italian films? I'm sure Ginger Rogers and Gary Cooper went to see Bellissima numerous times. Hahaha

This cute little video does a deep dive into that particular Oscar race and the factors which might have led to Magnani's win.

Oh my God, Jennifer Jones was playing a Eurasian, that means half European and half Asian. so why does an Asian woman have to play a Eurasian? Why can't a European woman play a Eurasian? I never understood that.