Women-in-Prison Movies
I Want to Live!, 1958
Most WIP dramas are B movies, sometimes Z's, but this one was A all the way. Robert Wise, who later directed West Side Story and The Sound of Music, steered Susan Hayward to a Best Actress Oscar. She brings all of her Brooklyn grit to the role of Barbara Graham, a true-life hard case who was the third California woman executed in the gas chamber. In jail on a murder rap, Barbara can't break the habit of talking snarkily to the police, her fellow cons and even those who try to save her. ("Life's a funny thing," says a sympathetic psychiatrist, to which she snaps, "Compared to what?") Hayward plays it tough right to the end: heading for the gas room, she says, "Just this once, I wish it wasn't 'ladies first.' " The real Barbara Graham's last words were worthy of Stanwyck at her most bitter: "Good people are always so sure they're right."