"Women reason with life only just so far", a smug Inspector Pope (Raymond Burr) informs a Machiavellian housewife, Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) at a pivotal moment in Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion, a late film noir from 1957. "Frustration", he intones solemnly, "can lead them quickly to violence". Seated before him in his bare, anonymous office, she seems awfully impressed with his clinical insight into the mindset of Woman; she reacts with muted awe, as if he were Freud, Jung and William James himself all rolled into one. Of course it's all a big schmooze act; just another element in her desperate scheme to advance the fortunes of her big dumb cop husband, Lt. Doyle, (Sterling Hayden) before she goes absolutely nuts from their despicably middle-class existence. Toward that end she'll do anything.

Kathy Ferguson, an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist on a San Francisco daily, is put on an assignment: a woman from Los Angeles has pumped three bullets into her now-late husband and has taken refuge in the Bay area, so Ferguson is tasked to drum up some Human Interest slop as a circulation builder. Not desiring the assignment, she takes it and quickly alienates the Homicide bulls sent up from L.A. Both Captain Alidos (Royal Dano) and his partner Lt. Doyle have a low opinion of the press; and this Sob Sister stuff makes their blood boil. Ferguson’s schmaltz actually works, though. The fugitive comes out of hiding; the cops get to go home; and Kathy Ferguson is a hot commodity in the Journalism racket; landing a very sweet job in New York. She’s also won the admiration of Lt. Doyle who, as an afterthought, invites her to L.A. to have dinner. She accepts. Their night on the town is a whirlwind courtship, resulting in their dashing off to City Hall and taking their vows. Now ensconced in a blank, sundrenched L.A. suburb, the new Mrs. Doyle realizes that the life of a typical American hausfrau is not the one for her. Spending days twiddling her thumbs -- not to mention those paralyzing evenings around a bridge table with the boys from Robbery/Homicide and their wives -- is not how she saw her future; particularly in light of all she threw away. She knows she can never go back to the newspaper business, so the best alternative is to have her man promoted up the hierarchy of the L.A.P.D, whether he likes it or not. Her campaign centers on laying siege to a senior official, Inspector Pope, who has all the charm and joie de vivre of cracked linoleum. Schmoozing him is indeed a forbidding project; but there’s nothing she won’t do. She’ll sit in this crashing bore’s office day after day while he explicates his jive theories on What Drives Women to Kill; she'll even sleep with him if it should come to that. Her devotion matches her desperation, and she’s in it to the end. Her campaign soon looks a smashing success. She launches her husband into the same social strata as the rest of the department’s top brass, Pope included. Then suddenly, it’s not enough.

Barbara Stanwyck was indispensible to the history of film noir, having left an indelible mark on the genre (and on American film) with her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson in Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), and thereby codifying the noir standard of predatory female for all time. Throughout the 40s and early 50s she appeared in a number of noir’s benchmarks, e.g. Milestone’s The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Siodmak’s The File on Thelma Jordon (1950), and as a result her identification with noir only deepened. But through it all she was never as effective playing the victim of the piece, as in Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) or John Sturges’ Jeopardy (1953), as she was the victimizer; the ‘black widow’, the corrupted (and corrupting) catalyst igniting the darkest impulses of every man she touches; sending them to their doom. Jo Eisinger’s screenplay for Crime of Passion provided Stanwyck with an unusually complex amalgamation of these conditions; a woman who fits less neatly into a preordained type than any of her previous characterizations in the noir canon. It is a powerhouse piece of acting: irritated, oozing dissatisfaction from every pore; perfectly embodying the frustration Burr prattles about while rendering his generalizations as fatuous as they sound (she’s not led to violence quickly, but inevitably). Stanwyck bulldozes through the implausibility’s of her character -- after all, a career-woman who gives everything up in a heartbeat for marriage and, just as quickly, turns into a small-time Lady Macbeth is not an easy, comfortably logical part for any actor to get hold of firmly -- and expresses Kathy Ferguson’s tragic core. She’s not the ‘black widow’ anymore, nor is she just another victim. She sends no one to their doom but herself. Crime of Passion was Barbara Stanwyck's last appearance in a film noir and it remains her finest work in this most death-dealing strain of American Cinema.

A flawed film, Crime of Passion is, nevertheless, a model of late-50s noir. Gerd Oswald (along with cinematographer Joseph LaShelle), invests the film with a seedy, squashed look which had lately emerged as the genre’s standard. Throughout the 1950s, film noir began to undergo a gradual, but ultimately drastic revision; not in terms of theme, but of style. The German Expressionist hangover of light and shadow that dominated noir in the 40s -- and typifies it in the public imagination to this day -- was starting to disappear. Bit by bit, directors and cinematographers found themselves tossing most of the visual trappings of noir aside; opting instead for a naturalistic look which often had the effect of making their films more unsettling than they would otherwise have been.

Of course, there remained a surfeit of Night and Dread in these films. Their less baroque visual surfaces were, it can be argued, simply a far more subtle form of stylization. But there was also a marked difference from their predecessors. Film noir’s, by the end of the decade, were no longer drenched in shadow from beginning to end; the visual motifs so familiar from repeated usage were now employed sparingly, strategically. Movies like Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me (1950), De Toth’s Crime Wave (1954), as well as Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) were narratives of human desperation that now took place in all-too-recognizable American settings. No longer confined to the cities, noir directors now shifted their focus to the suburbs; exploring dimensions in middle and lower-middle class American life which really hadn’t been addressed onscreen since the early 30s. As a consequence, there was no succor to be had in esoteric, beside-the-point discussions of ‘chiaroscuro’ and other film school gobbledygook. Film Noir crystallized into such a monolithic, graceless and endlessly bleak portrait of the world outside the confines of the cinema that the films frequently appeared outwardly primitive in comparison to the more artfully rendered landmarks of the previous decade. This is perhaps why the noirs of the 50s aren't as fondly remembered by moviegoers as those of the 40s. They don’t give themselves over to rationalization as freely; they bother us in ways we can't define, not even to ourselves.

In Crime of Passion there exists that same deliberate lack of stylization. It resonates beyond its merely being another low budget ‘B’ picture. It isn’t a documentary look at all, but something far more complex. Every interior is cramped, somewhat squalid; every exterior overbright and devoid of spatial mystery. You can easily imagine these events taking place in a setting such as the one Oswald creates. Kathy Ferguson’s manic desperation and her gradual reconciliation to the reality of pulling that trigger begin to contain a logic which might have proven elusive in the more traditional noir universe.

Bereft of shadow, all we’re left with is this woman and her terrible impulses. That’s it. Conseuqentely, Crime of Passion becomes one hell of a lot more believable than we ever thought it could be.

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© Copyright Tom Sutpen 2005. No part of this article may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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