Posted as part of the Breaking News: Journalism in Classic Film Blogathon, hosted by Comet Over Hollywood.
As everyone knows, career women (especially in classic films) are a rare breed of diseased characters who need to be cured through domestication. Once married to a good man, a (former) career woman presumably lives a normal life, inoculated against her unnatural occupational fixations with the wholesome combination of kids and dogs and bacon and eggs and draperies.
However, not many films explore how this domestication might actually play out. Crime of Passion (1957) starring Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, and Perry Mason (Raymond Burr, that is) takes the career woman character to her logical–and tragic–end.
First a Synopsis
Our story begins with a newspaper truck barreling through San Francisco. On the side we see this advertisement.
So we see this picture of our protagonist, Kathy Ferguson, and we see she’s one of those “Dear Abby” type columnists, and we’re probably supposed to think she’s all soft and feminine and sympathetic and all that.
And then we cut to the newsroom, where Barbara Stanwyck is Barbara Stanwyck-ing around, wearing practical clothes, trading wry witticisms with coworkers, and generally showing she’s not as prissy as we might imagine a ladies’ columnist to be.
Her editor sends her out to get a scoop on “the Dana woman”–a woman accused of killing her husband in Los Angeles and holing up someplace in San Francisco–and write a piece from some lady angle. She at first does not want to go because she’s got other stuff to do, but he says they can just run some of her trash from last month and nobody will notice. She reluctantly goes to the pressroom at the police station or wherever, and everybody’s on a personhunt for “the Dana woman,” including two detectives from Los Angeles–Captian Alidos and Lieutenant Doyle (Sterling Hayden). Alidos tells her point blank, “Your job should be raising a family and having dinner ready for your husband.” This is her response: