I Want to Live!
Women Killers, Male Authority, and Capital Punishment
Welcome to the first edition of Sisters Under the Mink, a newsletter on the criminal women of film and TV. It comes with the hope that the platform will be a broad church for me to write about everything from 1940s noir to contemporary documentary, the prison-industrial complex to Sicilian omertà . But I must admit that I have a soft spot for the glamourous, only-in-the-movies kind of crime: slinky femme fatales and Gloria Grahame-style gangsters’ molls. That’s where the name of this thing comes from, after all: as the quote from The Big Heat (1953) goes, to be ‘sisters under the mink’ is to have all your protection and material wealth provided by mobsters and their cohort. It is to subscribe to a particular worldview, to turn your head the other way, to get onto the arm of a gangster and stay there. Yet to be under something is also to be subordinate to it. You don’t get a mink for nothing, after all. And if you’ve seen The Big Heat (if you haven’t, you should), you know what a steep price Gloria Grahame pays for it.
I plan to return to this, and all the glitzy, hard-boiled storytelling it entails, but something different stopped me in my tracks this week. On Wednesday, I read Rachel Louise Snyder’s deeply troubling NYT piece about Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed by the federal government of the United States in seventy years. I didn’t realise that Montgomery had already been executed by the time I had finished reading it. The whole thing hit me like a ton of bricks: the horror of her crime but also of her upbringing, the failure of the system, the cycles of violence, but also the enormous ignorance of a whole vengeful, male-dominated judicial system who would rather be rid of her, a brutally final decision, than to grapple with the duty of care she was owed as a victim, or the realities of the sexual violence visited upon her.
Montgomery committed an heinous, gruesome crime in 2004, murdering a pregnant 23-year-old named Bobbie-Jo Stinnett. But she also spent her entire life having crimes inflicted upon her; from childhood, she was tortured and raped by her family on such a scale that by adulthood she was cognitively impaired beyond help. A final crime was committed by the federal government, who in spite of pleas for clemency, decided to end her life via lethal injection. She was the first woman to be executed by the government since 1953, and one of an astonishing six set to die in the last week of the Trump administration.
Reading Montgomery’s story reminded me of a great 1958 film by director Robert Wise whose title speaks for itself: I Want to Live! It was based on a real woman, Barbara Graham, who had been executed in California a few years before, and it was written by a San Francisco Examiner journalist who had closely reported on the trial and execution of the 32-year-old murderess. Graham, like Lisa Montgomery, had an abusive and sexually exploitative childhood, growing up to be a prostitute and petty criminal with a police record as long as your arm. Finally, what sent her to death row was the burglary and murder of a sixty-something widow along with three male accomplices, who were also sentenced to death.
The story was taken on by exec producer and talented filmmaker in his own right, Joseph Mankiewicz, along with independent producer Walter Wanger. It’s Wise, though, who leaves a mark on the movie. The West Side Story (1961) filmmaker had long shown an interest in the underside of city life and the delinquents who roamed it, from despairing boxing drama The Set-Up (1949) to the laceratingly cynical heist film Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), in which the stinger of a conclusion sends up the absurdity of racism. Wise was a liberal, but never in the vein of your sermonising Stanley Kramers, and always with a noir-laden, roguish sympathy for the motivations of the lawbreaker.
This sympathetic attitude extends to the diamond-hard Barbara Graham, played in a Oscar-winning performance by Susan Hayward, all husky voice and borderline-haughty tilt of her chin. She’s a world-weary spitfire who always has a sarcastic reply handy, and she exists in an overwhelmingly male world, conditioning her for toughness but also setting her up for failure. It’s a surprisingly frank depiction of the real Barbara’s background, though it cuts out any but the briefest references to her childhood: she’s a grown-up floozy with multiple divorces under her belt, surrounded by larceny and drug addiction, and when her junkie husband smacks her with her baby in her arms, she throws him out on his ear. When someone asks Barbara what she does, she says knowingly: ‘The best I can.’
The opening of I Want to Live!, with its slinky jazz score and aggressively jagged Dutch tilts, sets you up for a very different movie than the one you end up with two hours later. Wise’s bait and switch is a smart one: it uses a seedy noir backdrop to frame what turns out to be a powerful, bone-chilling depiction of the final days of a doomed woman. As the film builds to its conclusion, it takes on a pared-down quality, with Wise depicting the methodical steps leading up to the event. This includes multiple stays for the prisoner so that her lawyer could continue to argue on her behalf, ultimately only resulting in excruciating delays. Wise attended an execution by gas chamber at San Quentin in preparation for the film, and it must have left an impression. In those last hours, there’s clock-watching, a flurry of phone calls, the careful mixing of noxious chemicals for the gas chamber, and some kindly shared cigarettes with a night-shift nurse. It’s stomach-twisting brutality cloaked in the guise of professionalism, and Wise is unsparing with the minutia. You begin to twitch and sweat waiting for Barbara’s fate, just as she does.
While the film’s accurate depiction of Graham’s final hours and of the careful regimentation of death row was praised, I Want to Live! does have a crucial flaw. Although the trial was botched in numerous ways and conclusive evidence was never found, it is now generally believed that Graham was guilty. I Want to Live! does nothing to support that, arguing for her complete innocence. It supposes that Graham was not only innocent of actually having bludgeoned the widow to death, but that she was not even present at the scene. Later reports of what the movie missed or ignored have shown this to be unlikely, in spite of opening and closing text in the film’s titles insisting that it is a ‘factual story’.
But even beyond positing that Barbara was falsely accused, the film goes further to present her in a likeable light. It works. Graham is played by Hayward with a total disregard for the social and moral conventions of her era. She’s a sex worker but for the most part not down-at-heel; she mocks catcallers, tells men she’s not their maid, and calls housewives ‘stupid squares’. It’s a pleasure to see a woman in a mainstream American film of the 1950s behave this way and still be presented as remotely likeable. But it’s telling that in order for her to have such rare latitude, she would have to be a woman set for execution. The final point about Barbara is that she was, as Hayward and others believed, a ‘good mother’. This is belaboured in the film, with several scenes displaying Barbara with her young son (in real life, she did have a boy about two at the time of her death.) The film shows a pressing desire to vindicate her through showing the more domesticated aspects of her life.
As Snyder’s piece for The Times points out, Lisa Montgomery was not what you would call a ‘good mother’. She was neglectful, essentially incapable of looking after her children or herself. Yet rather than this fact being presented by her legal team as a part of her overall mental condition, it was kept quiet by her all-male defense. They believed it would simply make her look even worse. Just as the men who made I Want to Live! worked so hard to lionise good motherhood, the men who defended Lisa worked hard to hide her maternal faults.
Mary Atwell, an expert on gender and the death penalty, explains that the press and the public paint women who they believe deserve the death penalty in a very particular way. ‘They were considered to be bad mothers or unfaithful wives or promiscuous or in some cases, lesbians,’ she says. ‘The crimes were treated as if they were so much worse, because this is a woman that failed to be the woman that she should have been’.
The closest I Want to Live! comes to addressing this is Graham’s treatment in the headlines, a very real element of the actual case. They nicknamed Graham ‘Bloody Babs’, commenting on her sexual history and her appearance. Plus ca change: this week, the Daily Mail’s triumphant headline announcing the execution of Lisa Montgomery refers to her, with repulsive pithiness, as ‘the womb raider’. These nicknames only only support the idea that on the rare occasion a woman is set for the death penalty, she must not only be guilty, but a betrayer of her very sex.
A similar dichotomy plays out when you consider physical appearance. The real Barbara was pretty (the photo above shows her with a journalist), and it hardly ever went unmentioned by the papers. It didn’t hurt when Hollywood came calling. In I Want to Live! the prisoner maintains her dignity - interchangeable with her femininity, in this case - by dressing carefully for the gas chamber and refusing to take off her high heels when asked. It’s unlikely Hollywood will ever come calling for the Lisa Montgomery story: it’s less film noir and more horror movie. Montgomery had severe brain damage, and a notable lack of physical hygiene to go with it. She was a broken person, whose tragedy begat more tragedy begat state-sanctioned murder. It’s difficult to imagine even the most craven of true crime binge content creators (Netflix, hello) making her story palatable to viewers. Lisa Montgomery was so much not the palatable figure to the media. Unlike Barbara, she had no chance of being thought innocent, no looks or idealised motherhood to parade to the public.
Montgomery and Graham were very different women, with very different lives and cases. But one tends to shed light on the other. You see, the reporter who was actually at the trial and execution - the one who wrote I Want to Live! - makes himself a supporting character in the film. Actor Simon Oakland portrays him as an arrogant journo who subjects Graham to a trial by press, only to change his mind about her guilt and work to exonerate her. This man veered into overcorrection, dedicating an entire film to the idea of Barbara’s innocence rather than admitting that the true moral failing was really in taking her life, regardless. But that would have been much more difficult: knowing her guilt and seeking clemency for her nonetheless. I Want to Live! is righteous in its purposes, and commendably modern, showing domestic violence, prostitution, and male arrogance in its most destructive form. Hayward is brazen and heartbreaking. But the men who created and wrote the film could not seem to entertain the possibility that Barbara Graham might have been guilty as sin and every bit as worthy of survival. It suggests how difficult we find it to reckon with truly guilty women, truly homicidal ones, truly broken ones, like Lisa Montgomery.
In 1955 when she was killed, Graham had some final words. They were so ridiculously cinematic that Robert Wise actually excised them from the film, perhaps because they would test credibility: ‘Good people are always so sure they’re right.’
Lisa Montgomery was asked if she had any last words. She said no.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you enjoyed this newsletter and would like to give me a bit of help in continuing to bring it to you / take the time to do it, a subscription is only £5 per month. If not, no sweat! It would mean the world to me if you shared it on social media or with your friends.