Simon Oakland

I Want to Live! won Susan Hayward a Best Actress Oscar and yet the film, like Hayward herself, is barely remembered today. The story of a woman who is convicted of murder and is then executed in a gas chamber, it is an emotional and fairly gruelling drama which leaves one question entirely open – did she deserve it? – to focus on the unsavoury mechanics of the execution itself. But first a couple of prologues, one by the writer Albert Camus, billed as the Nobel Prize winner, enjoining us not to look away, the other from the Pulitzer-winning journalist Ed Montgomery, who covered the case, and vouches that what you are about … Read more