78/100 (up from 74)
Second viewing, last seen at MoMA in 2008. “Hyperactive noir setup is so tasty it’s almost a letdown when the doomy plot kicks in,” I tweeted back then, and Wise really does direct I Want to Live!’s arresting pre-arrest first act as if he were making Born to Kill or The Set-Up, employing gorgeous transitions—exterior shot of a cheap hotel that cuts to an interior view with the vertical neon sign’s ‘H’ visible through a window; whip-pan from Barbara dancing with giddy abandon to a still of her in jail, which becomes a montage of photos on the wall set to raucous jazz, its beat taking us into the next party—that had me wondering whether he deserves more credit than he generally receives for Citizen Kane’s look. Pungent dialogue early on, too, my favorite example being, in response to someone remarking upon how wholesome Barbara appears, “I’ve seen angel pusses who’d shoot their own grandmothers in the back and take bets on which way they’d fall.” (Only the Coens still come up with lines like that, and now we may have lost them.) Also wonder whether Tarantino swiped the idea for Pulp Fiction’s slowly receding title (with the other credits superimposed upon it as it keeps getting smaller and smaller) from this film, which does pretty much the same thing. Anyway, the opening’s so damn strong that it genuinely kinda does feel as if a potential all-timer gets diverted into something that’s still quite strong but more melodramatically conventional.
But then there’s the rest of my first-viewing tweet: “Hayward pwns.” (You can tell it was 2008. That term was probably already passé 18 years ago, actually.) Which indeed she does—I haven’t yet seen Deborah Kerr in Separate Tables, but she’ll have to be phenomenal to persuade me that Hayward’s Oscar for this role wasn’t richly deserved. The histrionics suggested by a breathless exclamation-point title like I Want to Live! are actually her performance’s weakest element; she’s electrifying at Barbara’s most sardonic and self-possessed (wish I could bottle her inflection when the john she rescues from arrest says “Gee, life’s a funny thing” and Barbara asks “Compared to what?”), subtle enough to appear sympathetic even as she’s telling one of the death-row guards a story about her husband that we know is pure bullshit. While the film pretty clearly represents Graham’s execution as unjust, that late reminder that she can be a liar cuts the other way, as do various narrative lacunae toward the beginning that theoretically could include her participation in the murder. My issue with true-crime tales that doggedly stick to the facts never arises here, both because the film doesn’t always do that and because the accurate parts are ridiculously cinematic: Barbara getting tricked into (falsely?) confessing to an undercover cop who she thinks is selling her a phony alibi (really happened!), multiple stays on the night of her execution that accomplish nothing except to prolong her anticipatory agony (likewise!). Surprised they chose to omit Graham’s caustic final words (“Good people are always so sure they’re right”; we do at least get her asking “How would you know?” when told that breathing in deeply will make her final seconds less painful), but the final shot, with car horns blaring as all the reporters and observers head home en masse and Montgomery switching off his hearing aid (seen throughout but wisely—Wisely?—never remarked upon) so that he doesn’t have to listen to the world move on from this moment, couldn’t be more sublime.