Crime of Passion (Robert Goldstein Productions, United Artists, 1956, released 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after the disaster of Sins of Jezebel my husband Charles and I got to watch a great film on Turner Classic Movies’s “Noir Alley” program January 10: Crime of Passion (1956), directed by Gerd Oswald (German expatriate and son of Richard Oswald, a director with a greater reputation than his) from a script by (a boy named) Jo Eisinger. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller hailed Eisinger as one of the key writers in film noir, mainly on the strength of his credit for Gilda (1946), co-written with Ben Hecht and Marion Parsonnet. Muller’s intro talked up Eisinger in general and his script for Crime of Passion in particular as a harbinger of feminism in movies, and just as I was thinking, “Yeah, right … ,” the film started and it became clear that, if anything, Muller was underestimating the feminist ideology in Eisinger’s script. Crime of Passion stars Barbara Stanwyck (in her last noir role) as Kathy Ferguson, advice columnist for a San Francisco newspaper, who longs for more serious work assignments and appears to get her big break when a couple of Los Angeles police detectives, Charlie Alidos (Royal Dano) and Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden, second-billed), show up to arrest a woman wanted for the murder of her husband. Alidos makes a snippy comment to Kathy’s face that the only proper role for a woman is to be married to a man, cooking his meals, cleaning his house, and bearing him children. Kathy says she’s not interested in getting married at all – there’s a great line in Eisinger’s script in which, discussing how to respond to a 17-year-old girl reader who’s having an affair with a married man and is trying to get him to leave his wife and run off with her, she says, “Tell her to forget him and run off with the wife.” (My husband Charles applauded that line, and I wonder what 1956 audiences made of it.) When her tip to the L.A. cops, who both seem to have gone to the Jack Webb School for Playing a Police Detective, results in the woman’s arrest she gets an offer from a big paper in New York and agrees to take it. But Bill Doyle has other ideas: he demands that she meet him in L.A. for dinner on her way to New York, and during that dinner date he persuades her to give up her career and settle in L.A. as his wife.

Kathy is, not surprisingly, totally bored with her life as a suburban housewife (incidentally, the Production Code had loosened enough that she and Bill are shown sleeping in the same bed, and indeed the absence of either of them in the bed becomes a major plot point) and in particular with the cadre of women neighbors she’s plunged into the middle of, who always seem to be gossiping about who’s having affairs with whom while their husbands play interminable poker games in the next room. Bill Doyle is in awe of the legendary L.A. detectives’ division head, Tony Pope (Raymond Burr in his last film noir, playing a mostly sympathetic character on his way from being “typed” as a villain to playing the lead on the long-running TV series Perry Mason), who agrees to retire after his long-suffering wife Alice (Fay Wray, looking hardly at all like the “Beauty” who attracted King Kong in the classic 1933 film) starts losing her sanity. Kathy is desperate to see her husband get the appointment to replace him, and to that end she goes to Tony Pope’s house while his wife is out of town and seduces him. Eisinger keeps it powerfully ambiguous whether she has sex with him out of lust, out of boredom (as was Stanwyck’s character’s motivation for having extra-relational activity with Robert Ryan’s in Fritz Lang’s 1952 masterpiece Clash by Night), in hopes that getting her as a lover will persuade Tony to give Bill the promotion, or for other reasons. If she gave herself to Tony in hopes that that would persuade him to hire Bill as his replacement, it doesn’t work; all along Tony has planned to recommend Charlie Alidos, the sexist asshole from the opening scenes in San Francisco, for the gig. There’s also a scene in which Bill Doyle bursts into a room and accuses a hapless police lab technician (Stuart Whitman in an early role) of spreading rumors that Kathy and Tony are having an affair even before they actually are, and as Tony conducts the internal investigation and cross-examines everybody on the scene, I couldn’t help but joke, “That man would make a good lawyer.” Kathy is so pissed off at Tony’s attitude that [spoiler alert!] she goes to his home and shoots him with a gun she’s stolen from the police station, where it was recovered as evidence from a shoot-out involving “high” teenagers. (The mere mention of drug addiction is also an indication that the Production Code’s iron grip on Hollywood was starting to loosen.)

Ultimately Doyle cracks the case by noting that the ballistic markings on the bullet that killed Tony were identical to the ones recovered from the scene of the previous crime; he asks Kathy if she shot Tony, she admits it, and he brings her in as the movie ends. Aside from driving Barbara Stanwyck’s character down a steep status tumble that reminded me of Radamès in Verdi’s Aïda, who descends from heir apparent to the throne of Egypt to traitor condemned to be buried alive, Crime of Passion is an unusually well constructed film. For once the story elements are deployed so effectively we’re not sure what’s going to happen next or how the tale will end. It’s clear from the title and the overall context that someone is going to murder someone else, but until it actually happens there’s considerable suspense about who the killer will be, who the victim will be, and what the motives are. In his intro Eddie Muller proclaimed Stanwyck the greatest movie actress of all time, and with that I’d agree; she had incredible versatility unmatched by any other actress in the classic Hollywood era and by only one since (Meryl Streep), and she was equally effective in romantic comedies, screwball comedies, romantic melodramas, Westerns (after her film career was over she made a major comeback as a Western matriarch in The Big Valley, which was essentially a rehash of Bonanza with her in the Lorne Greene role), and noirs. It’s true that she had terrible politics (she was a charter member, along with her then-husband Robert Taylor, of the blacklist-supporting Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals), but it’s also true that she was quite supportive of newcomers. Marilyn Monroe, who had a minor role in Clash by Night, said that of all the older generation in Hollywood Stanwyck was the only one who supported her and treated her with respect, and Lee Majors, who played one of her sons on The Big Valley, also had good things to say about how Stanwyck helped him in his early days. Crime of Passion is an unexpectedly great movie whose male writer ably dramatizes what Betty Friedan famously called “the problem that has no name” – the stultifying boredom women of intelligence and education faced when trying to live the circumscribed existence of wifedom and motherhood male society demanded of them – seven years before Friedan coined that phrase in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. At the same time I couldn’t help but remix the movie to have Kathy Ferguson Doyle look for a small paper in L.A., resume her career at least part-time, and confront her husband if he gave her any shit about it; at least then she wouldn’t have been driven to murder as an expression of her frustrations instead!