AllMovie

I Want to Live! is one of the screen's most powerful films. While Susan Hayward was often inclined to accept melodramatic scripts, nothing in her career tops her Oscar-winning performance as prostitute and con artist Barbara Graham, struggling to avoid execution in California's gas chamber. Graham's real-life struggle was well-known to the audiences of 1958. In lesser hands, a film of this sort could have become exploitative, but Hayward and director Robert Wise know just how far to take the material. The final thirty minutes are paced with an unrelenting intensity. Watch carefully for Hayward's performance in the death chamber scene, as she displays fear, anger, and a desire for whatever dignity there is left to find. All of the film's tech credits are good without being showy -- indeed, had they been more prominent, the film's effect might have been thrown out of balance. This is Hayward's film all the way, and she gives one of the greatest performances of any era.