I WANT TO LIVE!: And I want to believe!

Susan Hayward picked up the Best Actress Oscar at the 1959 awards for playing real life convicted murderer Barbara Graham.

Graham had been executed 4 years earlier in the gas chamber at San Quentin for the killing of a crippled woman during a robbery, and her case became something of a cause celebre as lawyers and journalists battled in vain to save her, arguing an innocent woman was being put to death.
Barbara Graham wanted to live!
And I wanted to believe! Oh god how I wanted to believe in Hayward's portrayal.
But I couldn't. I just couldn't.
I can understand how the part caught the attention of Academy voters. All the histrionics, the wailing and the beating of fists against the wall which proceeded the out-of-control partying, drinking and petty crime simply scream Oscar nomination.
Any self respecting actress would grab at the chance to play this sleazy, slutty, amoral, good-time girl rushing headlong from one bad decision to the next and unleashing a full range of emotions. It just shrieks "LOOK AT ME!! I'M PLAYING AGAINST TYPE! SEE MY RANGE!! I'M A REAL AC-TRESS!!!
So why do Oscar and me part ways?
Because despite all the histrionics and the gusto with which Miss Hayward dives into the part, I didn't find her convincing in the least.
It's not so much that she struggles to force her facial muscles to convey any kind of genuine emotion, nor is it the fact that she doesn't age at all despite the passage of time and the ordeal she undergoes (which are enough to drop a few pounds and add a few wrinkles on any normal human being).
It's her hair that ruined the illusion for me.
Her hair does not change or move at all for the entire duration of the movie. It's the same style and length at the start, when she's living it up with sailors on leave at a party in San Francisco, as it is at the very end when she's living three feet from the door of the gas chamber.
She has a lot of hair so it's impossible not to notice it. 
To convincingly play a part like Barbara Graham there has to be a few concessions to the ravages of time and the United States legal system. The thing with their hair says to me, here is an actress who didn't want it enough to mess up her hairdo, to cut it short or colour it or even wear a wig.
This is an actress who believed she could persuade us by sheer force of personality.
And she was right.
The Academy bought it. They believed Miss Hayward gave a better performance than Elizabeth Taylor ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), Deborah Kerr (in "Separate Tables"), Shirley MacLaine (in "Some Came Running") or Rosalind Russell (in "Auntie Mame").
That's the real crime committed in I WANT TO LIVE! And unlike the evidence against Graham, which the film would have us believe was shaky at best, the proof is indisputable, sitting right in front of us on Susan Hayward's head!

THE NAKED EDGE: caution - spoiler alert!

Stick around until the very end of the closing credits to THE NAKED EDGE and, as the screen fades to black, a disembodied voice will implore you not to reveal the secret of who killed Jason Roote to anyone else.

Well - spoiler alert - I'm going to do just that. There's no other way to provide a full and honest review of this 1961 thriller.

Gary Cooper's final film is a huge disappointment – and not just because there's no nudity or edginess.

THE NAKED EDGE depends entirely upon a false premise to sustain the tension, and the frustration I felt at the final denouement simply compounded the frustration that had already built up over the course of the story.

Cooper plays George Radcliffe, an American businessman living in London who comes into a large amount of money at the same time as a work colleague is found guilty - largely on Radcliffe's testimony - of murdering their boss, Jason Roote, and stealing 60 thousand pounds.

Radcliffe uses his windfall to go into business with a slightly shady Michael Wilding, and five years later he's living in an enormous mansion and being chauffeured to work in a Rolls Royce.

Life is tickety-boo, as the English liked to say in 1961, until a letter - delayed in the mail for five years - arrives accusing Radcliffe of Roote's murder and demanding half of the money he stole.  It's opened by Mrs Radcliffe (Deborah Kerr) who's immediately overwhelmed with doubts and suspicions which her husband does nothing to dispel by acting in an incredibly shifty manner.

There's faint - very faint - traces of Cary Grant's character, Johnny Aysgarth, in 'Suspicion' in Cooper's portrayal of Radcliffe, and a strong sense of director Michael Anderson attempting to evoke that earlier Hitchcock film, but really all the two share in common is a rotten ending.

Cooper's forced to drag out the ambiguity way beyond what's plausible, repeatedly deflecting his wife's increasingly distraught questions with increasingly ridiculous evasions. Why - when he's innocent - does he try so damn hard to look like a guilty man?

Everything he does and says is intended to fuel his wife's suspicions and push her to turn him into the police. Presumably if she did he'd be able to cop an insanity plea on the basis of his performance here.

Cooper tries his best with the material he's got to work with, and given that he was suffering from cancer and would die before the film was released, he acquits himself well but it is a thankless role and surely not the swansong he would have hoped for.

If you're willing to not simply suspend your disbelief but also hang, draw and quarter it as you're jerked around by a deliberately deceitful and heavy handed plot, and are happy to be deafened by a ridiculously melodramatic musical score, THE NAKED EDGE is the film for you. For everyone else there's 'High Noon' and the chance to witness Coop at his Oscar winning best.