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Storyline
Kathy is a smart and tough 1950's advice columnist at a San Francisco newspaper, with her name plastered on billboards all over the city. One day, Bill Doyle, a Los Angeles detective, walks into her office - it is instant attraction. After marrying Bill, Kathy gives up her career and becomes a homemaker. However, she is not your typical 1950's homemaker. After hosting several cocktail parties in their San Fernando Valley home, she realizes that Bill is content with his position, and shows no ambition in furthering himself. Kathy will not sit idly by while everyone around her is "moving up in the world". She personally takes upon herself the task of pushing Bill's career along, even if it comes down to murder. Written by
Kelly
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Goofs
When Kathy runs her car into a pole she steps in front of the car to inspect the damage. The right front fender that bore the brunt of the impact shows it is still firmly attached. However any trace of the headlight including the hole where it would mount is missing.
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Quotes
Alice Pope:
You said, "Bill, you better go right out and get your lunch because I've just driven up Mrs Pole's telephone Pope".
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It was interesting to read that Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way I do that the first thing a film should have is a good story. Sometimes some good acting can smooth over some glaring faults in the story, some time it can't. Even the brilliant pyrotechnics of Barbara Stanwyck couldn't quite bring Crime Of Passion off.
It's a strange film because her character makes absolutely no sense, accept in terms of hormones. She's a sob sister columnist for a quaint metropolitan newspaper in San Francisco and she's gotten a murderess on the run to write to her. Which of course draws the attention of a couple of homicide cops played by Sterling Hayden and Royal Dano.
Dano is all business and he wants a lead on where to catch the woman. But Stanwyck is eying Hayden like a prime rump roast in the butcher shop and she sends Dano off on a false lead, but gives the real goods to Hayden. So much for her job as reporter and protecting sources. Hayden doesn't go for it, but the two of them hit it off anyway and are soon happily married.
For a career woman, Stanwyck seems to settle down to housewife bliss, but she seethes with ambition for her husband to rise in the department. Hayden's a happy go lucky sort who just takes things as they come. Not good enough, she sets her mind to promoting her husband and if that includes giving a little nookie to his boss Raymond Burr behind the back of his wife Fay Wray, so be it.
Her change from career woman to sexual manipulator in Crime Of Passion makes no sense at all. She's a bad woman all right, right up there with her Oscar nominated Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. But whereas Phyllis was one ice princess, this Stanwyck does things on the fly. Her crime when she commits it is indeed one of passion.
This was not a film Stanwyck was particularly happy about, but she said that good stories for her and her contemporaries in the Fifties were hit or miss basis. Sadly Crime Of Passion is the latter.