Crime of Passion

In Gerd Oswald’s Crime of Passion, the delightful courtship between San Francisco columnist Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck) and Los Angeles police lieutenant Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden) results in an equally delightful suburban marriage complete with floral wallpaper and gender-segregated dinner parties. This most socially acceptable lifestyle, however, soon becomes a claustrophobic nightmare for the independent Kathy who no longer has her own career to nurture, so channels her competitive instincts into her husband’s career instead; Kathy’s initial breakdown brought on by boredom and mediocrity is fantastically over-the-top, presaging her more desperate strategy to come.  Crime of Passion is particularly fascinating through the lens of feminism — for or against, depending on your interpretation — in that a woman’s professional ambition is snuffed out by marriage and redirected through more primitive channels like adultery and violence. Some of the nighttime interior scenes are beautifully lit, especially in Kathy’s confrontation with Inspector Tony Pope (Raymond Burr) at his mansion, but much of the production design is blandly domestic just like the life Kathy seeks to escape.