General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

I Want to Live!

I Want to Live! is a 1958 American biographical crime drama directed by Robert Wise, starring Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham, a petty criminal and sex worker convicted of murdering an elderly widow and executed in California's gas chamber while maintaining her innocence. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, and Hayward won Best Actress for her performance.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	November 18, 1958 (wide, United States); 120 minutes; black and white, 1.66:1³^•²
Director and producer	Robert Wise; produced by Walter Wanger for Figaro, Inc.¹
Writers	Nelson Gidding and Don M. Mankiewicz, from articles by Edward S. Montgomery and the letters of Barbara Graham¹
Awards	Six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director; Susan Hayward won Best Actress²
Historical basis	Barbara Graham, executed at San Quentin on June 3, 1955, alongside Emmett Perkins and John "Jack" Santo, in California's first triple execution¹
Box office	$7,000,000 domestic³
Critical standing	94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (18 reviews); 83% audience score⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) is a party girl, shill at rigged card games, prostitute, perjurer, and petty criminal who tries to reform but falls back on her old ways when her new life crumbles.²^•⁷ Two men she knows murder an older woman; when they are caught and suspect that Barbara has helped the police arrest them, they tell the police that Barbara is the murderer as revenge.⁸ Arrested for fatally beating an elderly widow, Graham at first goads the police and refuses to answer their questions, but when an alleged accomplice turns state's evidence she insists on her innocence. Condemned by press and public, she is found guilty and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. As the execution date nears, she desperately attempts to expose the truth and save her life.²

Journalist Ed Montgomery (Simon Oakland), whose initial newspaper articles on Barbara's crime played up her recklessness, becomes convinced she may be innocent and begins a desperate campaign to save her from the gas chamber.⁴ The film ends with Barbara's letter to Montgomery, heard in voice-over, thanking him.⁹

Historical background

The film is based on the life of Barbara Graham, who was indicted for the March 1953 murder of the widow Mabel Monahan in Burbank, California. On June 3, 1955, Graham, along with co-conspirators Emmett Perkins and John "Jack" Santo, was put to death at San Quentin in the state's first triple execution. Graham was only the third woman to be executed in California at that time. As depicted in the film, she received two last-minute reprieves before her execution in the gas chamber, still maintaining her innocence.¹

Producer Walter Wanger was drawn to Graham's story after meeting Ed Montgomery, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, and reading his collection of notable criminal cases. The film's written prologue and epilogue state that the story is drawn from Montgomery's articles, other newspaper and magazine coverage, court records, legal and private correspondence, investigative reports, personal interviews, and Graham's own letters.¹ The film opens with the statement, "The pitiless story told in this film is a true story," and carries a quoted reflection on capital punishment attributed to Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning writer.⁵

The case left genuine uncertainty about Graham's guilt. A witness named John True, included in the film under another name, turned state's evidence and reportedly gave testimony corroborating that of Shorter, placing Graham at the crime scene holding the gun used to beat Mrs. Monahan. A March 1960 Los Angeles Times news item revealed that Graham purportedly confessed her participation in the Monahan murder to San Quentin Warden Harley Teets, who died in 1957, before the film's release.¹ Reviewers have noted the unresolved question: her conviction rested on what one critic calls a flagrant instance of entrapment, yet there is no satisfactory explanation of why her accomplices, two of whom were also executed, insisted that she was the killer.⁶

Production

The working title was The Barbara Graham Story; the title was changed because of low audience recognition of the case.¹ Filming ran from March to May 1958, beginning March 24, with locations including San Quentin State Prison itself, Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, San Rafael, and Hollywood.¹⁰

The supporting cast includes Simon Oakland as Ed Montgomery, Theodore Bikel as the psychiatrist Carl Palmberg, Wesley Lau as Barbara's husband Henry Graham, Philip Coolidge as Emmett Perkins, Lou Krugman as Jack Santo, John Marley as Father Devers, and Gavin MacLeod as a police lieutenant.²^•⁸^•³

Johnny Mandel composed the score, and the soundtrack features an outré jazz band with Gerry Mulligan on baritone saxophone, Art Farmer on trumpet, and Shelly Manne on drums, underscoring the nightclub world the film's heroine inhabits.¹¹ Lionel Lindon shot the film in expressionistic black and white, with chiaroscuro textures that critics have linked to film noir; William Hornbeck edited it.¹²^•¹

Style and themes

As the film moves from exposé-style exploitation toward a direct plea for clemency, director Robert Wise parallels Graham's path from criminal world to prison with noir-style shadow photography that gradually yields to a documentary-style realism.¹³ The final half hour is a gruesomely documentary-like account of the workings of the gas chamber, interwoven with the harrowing eleventh-hour attempts to obtain a stay of execution.⁶ Critics have described the film as both documentary and melodrama, both noir-inflected and propagandistic, and as an unapologetically political, anti-death-penalty piece made at the height of the law-and-order Eisenhower era.¹²^•¹⁴

Reception and legacy

The film earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director for Wise, Best Writing, Cinematography, Sound, and Film Editing, and Hayward won Best Actress. Hayward had been nominated four times before, for Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947), My Foolish Heart (1949), With a Song in My Heart (1952), and I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), and Graham was the role the Academy finally rewarded.²^•¹²

Critical reception has remained divided on Hayward's performance. Admirers read her fierce, abrasive embodiment of Graham as the raw expression of a woman confronting the machinery of execution; detractors find the same intensity shrill and theatrical. The gas-chamber sequence, meticulously staged, is widely treated as the film's signature moment and the one that secured Hayward's Oscar.¹² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 94% among 18 critics and 83% among more than 1,000 audience ratings.⁴

The film has been periodically restored and reissued; Kino Lorber released a remastered HD edition and handles theatrical and educational bookings.² It was given a limited Japanese re-release on August 8, 2025, under the title 私は死にたくない.³ Clips from the film appear in Christian Marclay's montage work The Clock (2010).⁵

The title has also been used elsewhere: I Want to Live (Aku Mahu Hidup) is a 1970 Malay-language film from Singapore, directed by M. Amin from a screenplay by Rajendra Gour, about a woman named Rahiman caught between the stepfather who forced her into prostitution and a policeman who loves her; it was considered progressive for presenting prostitution in shades of gray rather than moralizing black and white.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026