Crime of Passion

Plot synopsis:
Kathy Ferguson (Stanwyck) is a San Francisco newspaper advice columnist. One day, Lieutenant Bill Doyle (Hayden), a Los Angeles police detective, and his partner, Captain Charlie Alidos (Royal Dano), track a fugitive wanted for murder to San Francisco. He meets Kathy and they fall in love. She manages to gain the female fugitive's trust and locate her. Kathy's resulting front page story leads to an offer of a big job in New York City, but she abandons her career, marries Doyle and moves to Los Angeles.
Her new role as a 1950s suburban wife and homemaker quickly makes her unhappy. She wants her husband to move up in the world, to become "somebody". Doyle has different values. He works in order to afford a comfortable lifestyle, no more. Kathy schemes to push her husband up the career ladder without his knowledge. She arranges to get into a car accident with Alice Pope (Fay Wray), in order to become acquainted with her husband, Police Inspector Tony Pope (Raymond Burr), head of Bill's division. Pope realizes what she has done, and why, but plays along.
Her continuing ploys inevitably bring her into conflict with Sara Alidos (Virginia Grey), the captain's equally ambitious wife, and Captain Alidos begins to find fault with Bill at every opportunity. Vicious rumors circulate about Kathy's relationship with Tony Pope. When Bill sees a poison pen letter that Kathy has received, he rushes to work and punches his boss, Alidos, in front of two police witnesses. During the investigation, Pope shifts enough of the blame to Alidos, suggesting he reached for his gun when the visibly angry Bill burst into the room, that he can hush up the whole incident. Alidos is then transferred to another division, and Bill is given his former position as an acting homicide captain.
When Alice Pope breaks down under the years of mental strain of being a policeman's wife and is hospitalized, Tony decides to retire. When Tony comes to tell Kathy about Alice's breakdown and his plans to retire, Kathy tries to persuade him to recommend her husband for the vacancy his departure will create. During their talk, he seems to consider the idea favorably, then grabs and kisses her. She recoils at first, then embraces him. Afterward, however, he avoids her. When she finally forces him to meet her, he makes it clear that he believes that Bill is not qualified, and that he is going to recommend Charlie Alidos as his successor. This elevation of a man she hates over her husband's ambition infuriates Kathy.
When Kathy accompanies Bill to the police station, she steals a gun used in a robbery and murder that her husband is investigating. Kathy then confronts Pope in his home and pleads that he at least not recommend Charlie Alidos. If Pope recommends no one, Kathy argues, her husband still has a small chance and she can justify what she did. Pope coldly refuses so she shoots him dead.
The entire police department works on Pope's murder investigation. Bill figures out the killer has to have been his own wife. When Bill confronts Kathy, she tells him, "Now I'll know just how much of a cop you really are." Bill responds, "The same cop, Kathy. The same cop you met in Frisco. Same cop I was 10 years ago, pounding a beat. The same cop." He then drives her to police headquarters. Inside, before they disappear behind a door, she nods her head.

Tags: murder, melodrama

Review:
Stanwyck's slow descent into middle-class torpor and madness (she's a sharp, witty, intelligent woman who saddles herself with a maddeningly boring and conventional cop husband, played nicely against type by Sterling Hayden) lays bare the social nightmare presented to women desiring anything but the conventional patriarchal lifestyle (at one point, the LA police captain tells Stanwyck that she should be at home making her husband supper-- a line which haunts both Stanwyck and the film)..
Crime of Passion (1957)A gripping widescreen black and white crime film where the loner lost in a complacent world is a woman--played with steely determination by Barbara Stanwyck.
In some ways this film is a familiar type, but it has some unique lines that open up as it goes until it becomes a unique tale of seduction and ambition.You won't see Sterling Hayden better (this is around the time of his defining but more constrained role in Kubrick's "The Killing"), and throw in Raymond Burr and, believe it or not, Fay Ray (of "King Kong" fame, 1933), and you have quite a cast.
So thinks Barbara Stanwyck in "Crime of Passion," a 1957 film also starring Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr.
Stanwyck is newspaper woman Kathy Ferguson who, in the beginning, is going after the story of a crime being investigated by Doyle and Alidos (Hayden and Royal Dano).
Dano gives the newsroom a speech on the idea of "let us do our job" and Stanwyck is the only one who speaks up, stating, "And we're trying to do our jobs." Alidos' reply is a killer: "You should be home making dinner for your husband." Do you love it?
It leads to problems (that's putting it mildly).Stanwyck is terrific in a difficult role, that of a woman with more going on internally than even she knew; Burr does a good job as a hard-nosed, cold police inspector.
The successful columnist of The San Francisco Post Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) is an independent woman that has the intention of never getting married.
Bill is very close to his colleagues and their wives, and they have frequent dinner parties at his home, and the boredom of the conversation with other wives and the lack of ambition of Bill in the Police Department make Kathy to plot a scheme to push Bill's career to a higher position.
When Kathy realizes that Tony's promise was just pillow talk, the ambitious woman takes a decision with no return.The film-noir "Crime of Passion" is quite dated today but I believe that it was ahead of time in 1957 with an engaging and amoral story of ambition and murder.
Barbara Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson Doyle, an ambitious woman in the 50's not tailored to be a conventional housewife that loves her husband that is a man that prioritizes his family over his career.
Barbara Stanwyck gives her all to the role of a career woman who, though smart enough, maybe lacks the experience to see that the average joe she falls for, though amiable in his gruff way, is simply not the man for her.
Hayden was just about to quit movies, too, though like Stanwyck he would go on to interesting things later.
And Burr was soon to triumph on television as Perry Mason, leaving behind a decade's worth of good character work in film, of which this is one of the last examples..
What Wouldn't She Do For Her Cop. It was interesting to read that Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way I do that the first thing a film should have is a good story.
Even the brilliant pyrotechnics of Barbara Stanwyck couldn't quite bring Crime Of Passion off.It's a strange film because her character makes absolutely no sense, accept in terms of hormones.
Hayden doesn't go for it, but the two of them hit it off anyway and are soon happily married.For a career woman, Stanwyck seems to settle down to housewife bliss, but she seethes with ambition for her husband to rise in the department.
Not good enough, she sets her mind to promoting her husband and if that includes giving a little nookie to his boss Raymond Burr behind the back of his wife Fay Wray, so be it.Her change from career woman to sexual manipulator in Crime Of Passion makes no sense at all.
Her crime when she commits it is indeed one of passion.This was not a film Stanwyck was particularly happy about, but she said that good stories for her and her contemporaries in the Fifties were hit or miss basis.
Career gal and avowed bachelorette falls for a ten-year veteran on the Los Angeles police force; they marry, but his low-level status at the department--and the bottom-drawer company they must keep on the social set--brings up the wife's ambitious, scheming nature.
What begins as an interesting study of a woman columnist quickly turns into a potboiler, with Barbara Stanwyck as the newly-christened suburban housewife with discontent in her eyes.
This change of direction nearly doesn't work, though Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden (and Raymond Burr as Hayden's superior) are very good at keeping the scenario engrossing.
The actors are all good, with Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr all in top form.
One day Barbara Stanwyck is a hot San Francisco columnist who marries Sterling Hayden after an extremely brief romance.
She could rival I Love Lucy at any time.Raymond Burr enters the film as head of the police who falls for Stanwyck.
Crime of Passion (1957)** (out of 4) Sussessful woman Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) gives up her career when she falls for a police officer (Sterling Hayden).
Stand By Your Man. In San Francisco, lovelorn newspaper columnist Barbara Stanwyck (as Kathy Ferguson) helps visiting Los Angeles lieutenant Sterling Hayden (as William "Bill" Doyle) and fellow detective Royal Dano (as Charles "Charlie" Alidos) capture a woman who has murdered her husband.
Offered a better job in New York, Stanwyck gives up her career when Hayden asks her to dinner in Los Angeles.
Needing a release, Stanwyck gets it in the form of police inspector Raymond Burr (as Anthony "Tony" Pope) after a fender-bender with wife Fay Wray (as Alice Pope).
Watching Stanwyck as an increasingly hysterical suburban housewife is unbelievably amusing.***** Crime of Passion (1/9/57) Gerd Oswald ~ Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray.
For the first ten minutes, I was going "What?" and "Huh?" and "Who?" to no avail, and I knew I was in for a real endurance test.Awkwardly scripted and filmed, and deadly dull, "Crime Of Passion" is sort of a pre-feminist tantrum about a driven career woman who unwisely falls for a hulking, middle class police detective (Hayden), quits her newspaper job, feels suffocated by her mundane suburban existence and conceives some baffling scheme to improve their prospects.
At his worst, Hayden often looked like he was being forced to act in this type of B grade fare against his wishes, as if perhaps a close family member was being held hostage and wouldn't be set free until the final day of shooting.This is also incorrectly classified as a Film-Noir.
The joy of seeing this film, other than the unintentionally hilarious dramatic moments, is to get a clear picture of the type of world that director Todd Haynes envisioned in "Far From Heaven."Barbara Stanwyck, while possessing a hot figure for a 50 year old woman (at the time), was definitely pushing the borders with her looks.
It's just exciting to imagine them thinking, "Well, since we are getting paid for this, let's make it look good!" Poor Sterling Hayden is saddled with the worst lines, all of them sounding like they were written for a woman starring in a bad B-movie from the 1950s...
Kathy (Barbara Stanwyck) leaves the newspaper business to marry homicide detective Bill but is frustrated by his lack of ambition and the banality of life in the suburbs.
Her drive to advance Bill's career soon takes her down a dangerous path.Barbara Stanwyck, Raymond Burr, Fay Wray, Robert Quarry and others...
Stanwyck leads the way, and while this may not be her finest performance, it is always nice to see her in the lead.How this is not considered one of the better-known film noir movies out there is something of a mystery to me given those involved.
CRIME OF PASSION - never mind the generic title - exhibits much that's recommendable, but never quite jells as it might have under more imaginative direction and, much as I hate to fault powerhouse performers such as Stanwyck and Hayden, with different casting.What we have here is really a sort of suburban "All About Eve:" the portrait of a manipulative schemer who'll stop at nothing in service to ambition, even when that ambition is to be simply the dutiful woman behind the successful man.
By the mid-to-late 50's, some films were taking a hard-edged second look at the established conventions and revered institutions of postwar American life, and while this one appears at times to aspire to a similar examination - in this case, of the potentially stifling nature of traditional gender roles - it trips itself up in execution, leaning to heavy-handedness when subtlety is called for, and ultimately surrendering to a too-conventional presentation of a "woman at the breaking point" theme that was such a staple of players like Joan Crawford - and Stanwyck herself - during this period.The been-around-the-block maturity of Stanwyck at this stage of her career is squeezed into a rather tight fit: that of a career woman who, on the brink of long hoped-for advancement, sacrifices all for love and transfers her personal ambition to the professional betterment of her new husband.
Likewise, Hayden's normally brusque and self-assured persona seems uncomfortably constrained in the role of a pedantic police professional who cares little for departmental politics and career success, and is more comfortable with a solicitous passivity toward both his working and personal relationships.One casting bulls-eye is scored with Raymond Burr as the departmental chief who misses nothing, and immediately spots - and appreciates - Stanwyck for the kind of woman she is.
With this approach, he seems the only cast member with a handle on what a rich film CRIME OF PASSION could have been.If undemanding, it's diverting enough, and would certainly be worth seeing for Burr's multi-dimensional work alone, but it's also worth pondering, while one watches, the fascinating possibilities at which it all too briefly hints..
Having not seen the film before, my thoughts were that with Stanwyck, Burr, and Hayden, along with character actor Dano and Fay Wray, how could I go wrong?
Crime of Passion sees ambitious journalist Kathy fall for and marry the simple cop Bill Doyle and move into a world of settled domesticity.
Her ambitions however are not satisfied and as she tries to manipulate her way up the social and career ladder for her and Bill, she loses sight of what is important and things start to go wrong.With Stanwyck, Burr and Hayden in the cast I was looking forward to this film and on that front I was happy enough because the cast were as solid as those names would suggest.
The title of this movie gives the plot away, which is unfortunate because the titular crime doesn't happen until the movie is almost over!Barbara Stanwyck is a career woman, independent and resistant to the theory that a woman's place is in the home behind her husband-until she meets policeman Sterling Hayden.
The bloom comes off the rose pretty quickly, however, and she finds she hates garden parties and teas with other policeman's wives.Barbara Stanwyck, the pro that she is, makes sure to insert a very large amount of passion into her character from the beginning scenes, showing the audience what she's capable of and how she feels things deeply in the moment.
It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr and Fay Wray.
Yet it never fully delivers for dramatic purpose, leaving it as a modest entry in the last throes of the classic era film noir cycle.Plot sees Stanwyck as Kathy Ferguson, a strong and intelligent newspaper columnist who really doesn't suffer fools gladly.
However, when she helps the police with a crime she meets and falls in love with Lt. Bill Doyle (Hayden), and after a whirlwind romance she marries him and finds herself in a picket fence suburban hell.
etc.So, we have Barb Stanwyck, herself the protagonist of several pre-code films, some of semi-seamy variety, giving up a great career as a renowned true crime-scandal journalist, to marry Sterling Hayden, a non-ambitious police detective.
Actually - I think that a more appropriate title for this dizzy, 1957, crime-clunker would have been "Crime of Stupidity" - 'Cause, believe me, that's exactly what this idiotic film's storyline amounted to being - pure stupidity (as only Hollywood could possibly deliver it).You know - I can't imagine how anyone in the cast of this utterly implausible movie-nonsense could've ever kept a straight face, spewing out the totally awful dialogue that they did, and behaving like absolute brain-dead buffoons throughout.Personally, I think that that big, dull oaf, Sterling Hayden was one of the most insincere and unconvincing character actors of his generation, bar none.And, finally - Speaking about actress, Barbara Stanwyck - (At 50 years old here) - She was, in my opinion, absolute light years away from being believable, at all, as the irresistibly alluring business woman.
Well, if the woman is Barbara Stanwyck in the 1957 film "Crime of Passion," she connives, eliminates the competition, arranges phony accidents, engages in adultery and finally commits homicide, all to push hubby up the rungs of success.
Stanwyck, 50 here and nudging toward the end of her spectacular film career, is as intense as ever (she always gave her all in every picture); Hayden is his typically macho, upright self; Raymond Burr, playing Hayden's boss, is a tad less sleazy than usual but still not to be trusted; and Fay Wray, also 50 here and approaching the end of HER career, is fine in her small role as Burr's wife.
It's the story of a career woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who, tn middle age, marries a cop (Sterling Hayden) who forbids her to work, condemning her to a life of luncheons and card games.
The triviality and emptiness of this life is so soul-destroying, the Stanwyck character essentially goes crazy, and the movie ends with Hayden arresting his wife for murder.
Certainly, these "Ladies who Lunch" types would get on the nerves of an independent woman such as Stanwyck, and it becomes her life's mission to change their situation immediately.Stanwyck thinks like a ruthless businessman and schemes to get into the good graces of Hayden's boss's wife (Fay Wray), hoping that her husband (Raymond Burr) will look at Hayden for an important promotion.
Not as ruthless as her 40's film noir vixens Phyllis Diedrickson, Martha Ivers, or Thelma Jordan, Stanwyck's character is certainly a strong woman, having worked mainly around men and seemingly preferring their company.
The Stanwyck protagonist is the epitome of an independent woman who doesn't believe in marriage but she turns around and marries a veteran Los Angeles detective who lacks ambition.
She is going to move on up to something better.Suddenly, the plot creakily shifts and we never see the newsroom, or the sandwich boy for that matter (hell, thought he might show up as a witness or something later on, I mean, this was supposed to be a noir, right?) Stanwyck, who doesn't believe in marriage, kids, or anything like that, suddenly marries a police office she barely knows and met during work.It's not 10 minutes of screen time between when she seemingly rejects anything but a career and is next going on and on about wanting to do nothing but darn Hayden's socks.
An overwrought BARBARA STANWYCK tries hard to make CRIME OF PASSION  look like a steamy melodrama but the script, production values and  uninspired direction defeat her despite some valiant efforts in a  couple of strong scenes.
Sterling Hayden is convincing as her unambitious police lieutenant  husband who has no idea his wife is so unsatisfied with domestic life  that she's willing to kill the man who blocks any chances of a career  rise.
Raymond Burr gives the film's most interesting performance as a man who  "picked up the chips" Stanwyck tossed at him--and makes more of his  role than the script allows.
A hard-boiled middle-aged newspaper woman (Barbara Stanwyck) inexplicably falls for a police detective (Sterling Hayden) and gives up her career.
Stanwyck (like Dennis Price in a far better film) starts seeing how to remove competition for her husband, and ends up romancing Burr (married to Fay Wray).
CRIME OF PASSION is only worth seeing if one wants to see all of Stanwyck's films.
Kathy Ferguson(Barbara Stanwyck)is a newspaper columnist unhappy with her job.
Fun, low-budget late noir, where we see capable, independent career woman Barbara Stanwyck fall in love with straight-arrow L.A. cop Sterling Hayden, try to fit in as a happy Fifties housewife, quickly go insane from the effort, and commit the crime of the title.
Turning down a high paying job offer to work in New York City Kathy instead married Bill and moved to L.A. Living the boring life of a 1950's suburban housewife Kathy soon realized what a mistake she made in throwing away her career in the newspaper business for the laid back and not all that ambitious, in going up the ladder as a cop, Bill Doyle.
Barbara Stanwyck plays quite the character in Kathy Ferguson, who works for a newspaper.
This is a film noir style of movie which features Barbara Stanwyck as the wife of a hard driving chief police detective.
There is more to it, as Barbara Stanwyck is Kathy Doyle, Sterling Hayden is Bill Doyle, Raymond Burr is Tony Pope and Fay Wray is Alice Pope..