I Want to Live! (Figaro; United Artists). "When you hear the pellets drop," says the kindly guard to the beautiful doll as he buckles her into the cyanide chamber, "take a deep breath and count ten. It's easier that way." The beautiful doll only flings him a sardonic question: "How do you know?" Barbara Graham (Susan Hay ward), according to this skillful screen version of the life and death of one of California's most celebrated criminals (TIME. June 13, 1955), is a woman who likes to find things out for herself. At 25, she has found out what it is like to be a vagrant, a prostitute, a gambler's shill, a convicted perjurer who has already served a total of three years in prison. At 30, according to California's public prosecutor, she finds out about murder—by pistol-whipping an old woman to death in the course of an unsuccessful robbery.
BLOODY BABS, THE TIGER WOMAN, scream the tabloids, and the jury gives her the limit. But Convict Graham protests her innocence, and her protest is supported by a well-known psychiatrist. Says he: "She is totally immoral, [but] her crimes are the crimes of those for whom physical violence is impossible." The defense appeals. The court upholds the death verdict. The date of execution is fixed.
What follows is perhaps the most effective provocation to panic that has been seen on-screen since the high-explosive horrors of The Wages of Fear (TIME. Feb. 21, 1955). The executioners—friendly, ordinary, matter-of-fact men who look as though they had never dispatched anything more vital than a letter—proceed calmly with their preparations, and the camera dispassionately watches every lethal detail. Gravely they draw on their rubber gloves. Delicately they decant the sulfuric acid. Tidily they bundle the little white eggs of cyanide into a sack of gauze. Politely they unroll the carpet from the cell door to the gas chamber. And so it goes, on and on and on, for almost 40 minutes—right to the bitter end.
The spectacle of a public execution has always drawn a crowd, and this one will probably be no exception, even though the witnesses must pay for the privilege. But in the post-mortem many witnesses will wonder what is the meaning of the painful lesson they have just been read. Is it a sermon on the wages of sin? Not really. The heroine, according to the script, is not punished for something she did, but for something she did not do. Is it an attack on the practice of capital punishment? Possibly. But the script spends no sympathy on the two men convicted as the heroine's accomplices, who meet the same fate as she does. Well then, what is it? To judge from the far-out photography, real desperate sound track, and dragsville dialogue that Krylon-spray the whole film with a cheap glaze of don't-care-if-I-do-die juvenility, Producer Walter Wanger seems less concerned to assist the triumph of justice than to provide the morbid market with a sure-enough gasser.