I Want to Live!

The dialog and plot are excellent and her scenes as the condemned woman hours from execution are still extremely powerful today. In some ways, Susan Hayward was at her very best, and with the perfect script, a rare combination. You still sit there rooting for her to get that stay of execution in the movie, the movie grabs you that much. I've watched this film about 10 times, she never gets the stay, but the situations are so real, you root for one every time.

The only thing that to me does not make this Miss Hayward's best role (apart from maybe a handful of scenes) is that Barbara Graham, the real-life death-row inmate portrayed here, was a low-budget, crude, herion addict who got along by using men, doing petty thefts and sometimes being a prostitute, and I don't mean the $100 an hour ones that come to your hotel room. We're talking low-class street woman. Miss Hayward is nothing of the kind, she doesn't have that look or manner. Though the prison and death penalty scenes and themes are excellently and realistically portrayed here, you feel like you're watching a wrongfully-convicted society woman, nun, or school teacher getting the gas chamber, not a two-bit street prostitute/heroine junkie/thief. I don't think this necessarily takes away from the movie much or how it grips you, but for this reason, I'm not sure I would rate this the best of Susan Hayward. The Oscar was righting previous wrongs, in my opinion.

I highly recommend this film, and if you like it, try some of Susan Hayward's other films. She was really outstanding!

"I Want to Live!" tells the story of Barbara Graham, a wild party girl with a rap sheet a mile long who was convicted of murder in the early 1950's and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Penitentiary. The script whitewashes Graham's story, painting her as a more sympathetic character (i.e., "innocent") than she had been in real life, but Hayward comes through with a gutsy tour de force performance that provides the film with just the right amount of gritty toughness that elevates it out of the league of soap opera. Her Barbara Graham may be a "victim" of circumstances and a flawed legal system, but she is also loud, vulgar, crude, flippant, and antisocial, often working against her own best interests. And Hayward never hits a false note, provoking the audience to a strange mixture of contempt and compassion, repulsion and attraction. By the final scenes of the film, when Graham is at San Quentin with execution imminent, Hayward is able to gear down and underplay; she's done such a masterful job with her character thus far that the audience feels - and doesn't really need to see or hear - the turmoil within Graham as she resigns herself to her inevitable fate. It's a bravura piece of acting, and Hayward richly deserved the Oscar she won.

The DVD is amazingly clear and sharp. The black and white cinematography is brilliant; the shadows in some of the San Quentin sequences - especially those in which the death chamber is readied - are startling. And the film-to-video transfer is flawless; watching on a large screen TV, I could actually see the freckles on Miss Hayward's collarbone and define the ridges on her fingernails in some of the final closeup shots. Happily, the Original Theatrical Trailer is included on the disc; what a shocker it must have been to movie-goers at the time since it includes the famous scene of Hayward being led back to her prison cell repeatedly screaming the profanity that Rhett Butler almost didn't get to utter on screen less than 20 years earlier! Definitely a must-have DVD for fans of great screen acting ...