Crime of Passion

1956

Action / Crime / Drama / Film-Noir / Thriller

3
IMDb Rating 6.4/10 10 3421 3.4K

infidelity police ambition police operation press film noir

Plot summary

Kathy 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.

Director

Gerd Oswald Photo
Gerd Oswald

Top cast

John Roy Photo
John Roy as Desk Sergeant
Robert Quarry Photo
Robert Quarry as Reporter
Norbert Schiller Photo
Norbert Schiller as Helpful Man in Bar
Malcolm Atterbury Photo
Malcolm Atterbury as Officer Spitz
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
787.66 MB
1280*690
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 25 min
Seeds 3
1.43 GB
1920*1036
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 25 min
Seeds 4

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by AlsExGal 7 / 10

A lady who craves excitement...

... is who Kathy (Barbara Stanwyck) is. She's a reporter on a paper that usually gives her lonely hearts column assignments, but then she gets a chance to report on the case of a woman who has killed her lover. She writes a sympathetic column in which she encourages the woman to call her and talk, she does, and as a result Kathy finds out where she is hiding. Then she encounters the cheerless LAPD detective Charlie Alidos who tells her to give up the woman's location or he'll have her arrested, indicating that she should be home cooking dinner for her non-existent husband. Kathy gives Alidos a bum steer as far as the woman's location because she'd rather give this arrest to Alidos' partner, Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden), but he sets her straight that he and Alidos are partners and you just don't do that to your partner.Kathy gets a new job in a different city as a result of her helping break this case, but her new romance with Bill Doyle is getting in the way, and they marry in haste when she makes one of her trips back to California to see him. As was the custom in the 50s, she stops working and becomes a housewife. But being a wife and in particular the wife of a cop in the 50s is particularly boring, and she is soon going nuts from the constant company of the Stepford wives who comprise the wives of the cops who come over to play cards with Bill a few times a week. She also discovers that Bill is not particularly ambitious. He just thinks being a cop is a pretty secure job with OK pay and good retirement prospects and that is the end of it for him.So Kathy starts out to be ambitious for Bill if he will not be so for himself. She studies the driving habits of the wife of the head of detectives, Tony Pope (Raymond Burr) and manages to maneuver an "auto accident" with her, befriends her, and gets herself and Bill invited to their house for their parties. But almost immediately Tony Pope lets her know he has her number, knows the accident was planned, and that she is trying to get her husband promoted. But he is also obviously fascinated with her. At this point, if Kathy just wanted to promote her husband, she'd give this effort up since Pope has her cold busted. But she still hangs around Pope until an affair occurs. Why? Because Kathy likes the danger and excitement of dealing with Pope versus the ennui of being just another housewife. But Pope himself has a conscience and cuts off contact with her as a result of him feeling bad for betraying and cheating on both Bill and his own wife. This is when Kathy's actions become erratic and also, just plain dumb. Complications ensue.I particularly liked seeing Raymond Burr as the rather enigmatic chief of detectives. Not a white knight as he was in Perry Mason, but also not one his psychopathic characters when he was starring in the noirs, it was a nuanced role for him. Also note he is close to a normal weight here. This was made just as he was starting out on Perry Mason, and one of the conditions of getting that role was that he lose 60 pounds.
Reviewed by ricer 7 / 10

surprising social critique

Don't be put off by the negative commentary on this film (which surprises me almost as much as the film's unflinching social critique). Stanwyck gives a strong performance in an unusual late-cycle noir; unusual in that it opens in conventional noir style, wraps up the first noir plot in less than ten minutes, then proceeds into insightful and incisive melodrama. Sharper socially than even Fritz Lang's late noirs, "Crime of Passion" reminds us of the "nostalgia" for the "happy family values" of the 1950's for the wishful (?) thinking that it is. 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).
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