Was ever a femme more fatale than Barbara Stanwyck? So far as films are concerned, I think not. At her best, as in Double Indemnity, she had a magnetic screen presence. Even in less notable films she was seldom less than compelling. A case in point is Crime of Passion, which dates from 1957, and which I'd never heard of until I chanced upon it recently.
This is an interesting movie, made when she was approaching fifty, though you'd never guess. Her performance combines allure with menace, a characteristic blend, but there's also a good deal of vulnerability at key moments as her mental state deteriorates. She plays Kathy, a San Francisco newspaper columnist whose ambition and verve enable her to rise above crass sexism. When she encounters Bill (Sterling Hayden), a likeable detective from L.A., she falls head over heels and before she knows it, she has thrown up her job and settled down to married life.
But she soon becomes dissatisfied with the prattle of other police officers' wives and the limited horizons of their husbands. Bill is a decent chap, who wants to do his best to look after Kathy, but he lacks ambition. She becomes bored - dangerously so, when she encounters the top cop, Tony Pope (Raymond Burr). A fatal attraction develops between the pair of them.
Jo Eisinger's screenplay is crisply written, but this isn't a 'mystery' story. It's a drama, with some suspense, but perhaps because of the choices Eisinger makes, the ending may seem anti-climactic to many viewers. Indeed it did to me, but that's because Eisinger seems to have set out to say something about the nature of overweening ambition and its consequences. His focus is on character and above all the social attitudes of the time. This perhaps explains why the film is not quite powerful (or, frankly, convincing) enough to have earned classic status. But the acting is very good (Fay Wray and Stuart Whitman are also in the cast) and Stanwyck copes very well, in my opinion, with the demands the script puts upon her.
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