Best Actress: Susan Hayward
I can't think of a pithy opening line, but if you stick around for the ending of I Want to Live! you'll have no doubt in your mind as to why Susan Hayward won the Oscar.
I remember reading once that Susan Hayward really should've won her Oscar in 1947, for Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman and that despite a decade of strong performances that followed, they finally rewarded her in 1958 for I Want to Live! Of course, they also said that about Rosalind Russell, who was nominated in 1947 for Mourning Becomes Electra, and we all know who snuck in and won that Oscar.
All that to say, that if the disappointment of not winning the Oscar for such an acclaimed role motivated Susan into the career trajectory she had, then it's almost great that she lost. Because we got this indelible performance as Barbara Graham out of her.
In I Want to Live! Susan plays a prostitute and petty criminal named Barbara Graham who, after a lifetime of crime and bad decisions, has been indicted for murder and—if you only go by the plotline—framed by the two men who actually did it, only because she refused to rat on them. After she's caught trying to bribe an undercover cop into being her alibi, it's pretty much over for her, and she's sentenced to death by execution. She'll become only the third woman to be executed in the state of California.
This is where the movie drags, in my opinion. Between sentencing and appeals, we're treated to this protracted section of the film where Barbara vacillates between hope and despair, resignation and optimism, as the appeals happen off screen. They're scenes designed to give Susan the chance to act more; to humanize Barbara Graham; and to make you think that perhaps she wasn't involved in the murder. I've read that this movie has been accused of sanitizing Barbara's role in the whole thing, and I can understand why: the murder that she's accused of playing a key role in happens entirely off-screen and is never mentioned until you see the police tailing her to the criminal trio's hideout.
But then we get to the morning of Barbara's execution, and this is where Susan truly shines. A couple of stays delay her execution, and Susan plays how tense these hours are perfectly. It's riveting. Every time that phone rang, I jumped. I found myself watching Susan very closely, not really paying attention to the other people in the prison cell with her (her nurse/chaperone, the priest, the secondary workers on the execution floor who come in and slowly prepare her for that final journey to the gas room), because every move she made added to the performance. The way she held her shoulders. Her eyes darting around. The tilt of her head, holding her chin up, trying not to look afraid even though she's positively frightened. The blasé way she puts on her costume jewelry and argues against not taking her shoes off to walk into the room, as though she's just going out for dinner and not to her death.
The first time I watched I Want to Live! was well over a decade ago, and it came on late on TCM; late enough that I would've only gotten a handful of hours of sleep before I had to go to class, but I still watched it. It was one of the last movies I had to watch the first time I watched all the Best Actress winners, and I wasn't going to miss it.
That execution scene. It was unnerving the first time I saw it. I almost wanted to turn this off, but I couldn't make myself look away. Every tense second of that walk into the gas room. The way she cries out for a blindfold so she doesn't have to see all the men watching her die. The way she transforms herself into a statue as they're strapping her to the chair. The way, when one of the workers tells her to count to ten and take a deep breath to make it easier on her, she bites back "How would you know?" The way she clenches her fists and her breathing goes into staccato as she waits for the sound of the cyanide capsules to hit the liquid and disperse. The way her head slowly tilts and finally drops.
I know Susan won her Oscar for the whole film, she's great throughout, but I have to wonder how many people voted for her based on these last minutes alone. I can't imagine another actress being able to pull this off without descending into melodrama. For all of the ways Barbara does 'want to live', Susan never devolves the performance into soap opera by campily shouting out out the movie's title or sobbing through her mascara. She stays with Barbara and stays real to moment.
There were so many great performances this year. It's criminal that Rosalind Russell never won an Oscar, and Auntie Mame would've been a perfect 'lifetime achievement' Oscar. And Elizabeth Taylor pulling her performance as Maggie the Cat deep from within the confines of her grief... this would've been an deserved Oscar win for her, too. I haven't seen Separate Tables in over a decade and so I can't really comment, at this moment, on Deborah's performance; and even though Shirley shines in Some Came Running, it's really Frank Sinatra's movie.
I don't know that I would have voted for Susan, but I'm not mad that she won, she was a phenomenal actress who was also overdue for a win.
DID I LIKE I WANT TO LIVE!? I did!
Did you like I Want to Live!? What are your thoughts on Susan Hayward's Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
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