I Want to Live! (1958) on Netflix
Approved19582hBiographyCrimeDrama
Prostitute Barbara Graham gives two friends a false alibi and is charged with perjury. She lures men to thief Emmett Perkins's gambling parlor, and when police crack down she surrenders.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.5/108,427 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1950 San Francisco, Barbara Graham, a prostitute and petty criminal, faces a misdemeanor soliciting charge and returns to San Diego. There she is charged with perjury for giving two criminal friends a false alibi. She goes back to prostitution and lures men into thief Emmett Perkins's gambling parlor, saving enough money to quit and marry Hank, her third husband. Their son Bobby is born, but Hank's heroin addiction and abuse throw the marriage into turmoil. Barbara forces him out, loses her apartment, leaves Bobby with Hank's mother and returns to Emmett, who now works with John Santo and Bruce King. When police crack down, she surrenders and is questioned about the killing of Mabel Monohan, an elderly woman in Burbank. She says she spent that night at home with Hank and Bobby. A grand jury indicts her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Want to Live! (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Although the film, framed by a prologue and epilogue from journalist Edward Montgomery, portrays Barbara Graham as innocent of the murder, there may have been substantial evidence of her complicity in the crime, including her taped confession to an undercover officer.
- Director Robert Wise attended a public execution at San Quentin so that the film's execution sequence would be depicted as accurately as possible.
- After Nelson Gidding was hired to redraft the screenplay because it "lacked focus" and dwelt too long on Graham's troubled childhood, his version cut any depiction of the murder of Mable Monohan and Graham's months at San Quentin during her appeals.
- Billboard credited the popularity of the film and its Mandel and Mulligan soundtrack albums with prompting a rush of jazz film scores, citing Duke Ellington's score for Anatomy of a Murder as one example.
- Susan Hayward, the film's star, was entitled to 37 percent of the film's overall profit from the production.
