User Reviews

Lindsay Wagner took on a real challenge in this made for TV remake of I Want To Live. Susan Hayward's performance as Barbara Graham that got her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1958 was still fresh in everyone's mind. It's one of the greatest acting jobs in the history of film on sound. Lindsay bit quite a bit off to chew.

I think she digested enough of it so that she doesn't have to be ashamed of anything she did in this version of I Want To Live. In one way Wagner's version has an advantage over the Hayward film. This one concentrates on her whole adult life and how through the bad associations and bad choices she made, she slipped into a life of crime.

The issue in the Graham case was not her criminal career. She clearly was a criminal and was not above a lot of things. The issue was whether she could be convicted on nothing more than accomplice testimony. Don Stroud's character may very well have lied about her participation in the murder of Mabel Monahan for reasons of his own. There was no independent evidence establishing her presence at the crime scene. That was her argument and still remains the main reason why she should not have gotten the gas chamber at San Quentin.

As in the 1958 film, she was her own worst enemy in many ways. She had a previous rap for perjury and when she was caught trying to buy an alibi for the night of the homicide, her goose was cooked. In fact she did a whole lot of dumb things her whole life, consistently made the worst choice in any situation.

Still because you see a great deal more of her life before the Mabel Monahan homicide, you do develop a lot of sympathy for her. The sympathy you feel in the Hayward film is strictly because of the jackpot her criminal friends have put her in. In fact Harry Dean Stanton and Seymour Cassel do fine work as her criminal partners as does Martin Balsam as her overwhelmed lawyer during the trial.

Nothing can compare to Susan Hayward's performance in the first film version. But Lindsay Wagner did a fine job supported by an able cast. She wants to live, but on her own terms.

This pretty unwatchable unnecessary rewarming of the original 50s hit movie lacks any redeemable feature as it stars the vaguely attractive Lindsay Wagner in the famous Susan Hayward part and the totally unnattractive Pamela Reed taking on Simon Oakland's trailblazing press reporter role and turning him into a loathsome feminist hag. Her presence is permanently grating as Reed has only got one facial expression: SOUR.

They obviously DIDN'T want any close comparison to the original here, well they succeeded in THAT! Really, the only aspect they matched well was the questionable acting of the lead female. The job of portraying Barbara Graham was a dream role for any actress, a rare title role, and a truly meaty part in a true-life thriller. Susan Hayward overdid the acting and because timescale was lost after the murder trial, she seemed limited to overdoing the Bi-Polar flip-flop between "Hey, life's a ball, turn up the radio, I wanna hear that jazz!" and "Peg, I'm going to go to the gas chamber! I wish the waiting were over, I wanna die!" Thus it wasn't Susan's best film performance, merely the best part she ever had. Her job was to oversell the maker's objection to the death penalty and I suppose that coloured every aspect of the movie. As Wagner couldn't act, it's hard to tell if this was her best effort.

The original film had some serious acting talent, in the re-hash, Martin Balsam was pretty much on his lonesome. I suppose budgets count, but even the great Mr Balsam couldn't save this rotten movie, not even unwitting comedy could save this clunker, but fast-forward to the gas chamber scene and Wagner's facial expressions, it's acting right up there with the Pink Panther discovering the only food in the house, a carton of eggs, have gone rotten.

A solid 0/10.