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Kathy Ferguson, played by reliable Barbara Stanwyck, starts out as a tough, no nonsense witty newspaper woman not scared to go toe-to-toe with her male superiors. She's a 1930s kind of liberated movie gal who wants a lot more out of life than a husband and kids and an avocado-colored refrigerator. She's on her way -- even managing to finagle an offer from an NYC newspaper. But then she falls in love with Lieutenant Bill Doyle, an LA cop (Sterling Hayden) and her admirable backbone goes all squishy. Now her only ambition is to stay at home, cook and clean, and make her man happy. What a betrayal! How implausible!
She lands in a dull 1950s suburb where her circle of female acquaintances talk about their outfits and their clubs. It's Eisenhower-era conformism, caricatured, and Kathy is bored silly.
Then the film changes direction once again, and Kathy, channeling, I suppose, her earlier ambition, transforms into a noir-y "bad girl" determined to advance her husband's career by whatever means necessary -- in this case, by means of adultery and murder.
Crime of Passion covers a lot of ground both in genre and in human psychology. One critic says "it's both dated and progressive at the same time" -- which is correct and is a lot more polite than describing the film as "confused" or "irresolute."
I myself found Kathy's metamorphosis easier to swallow than her sexual attraction to Sterling Hayden's boss, played by hulking Raymond Burr.
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