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How others will see it. Graham ree Hayward looks like a classy dish, but she'll lie and cheat you. She also associates with the worst sort of people. And she can be coarse when provoked.
Cluck go the disapproving tongues. Yet every good girl has a bad girl inside of her, waiting to come out. The fascination with Barbara Graham back in the fifties wasn't because folks were amazed that a beautiful woman could kill. "Could" opens up an enormous realm of possibilities.
No, people were fascinated with Graham because she was the bad girl that lived the life they couldn't or wouldn't. Some wanted her executed, to teach a lesson or serve an example. Others wanted her alive, to keep open the possibility of further adventures, like a comic book villain who breaks out of prison (yet again) to threaten Gotham. Then there's the naive, who thought that such a pretty lady must have a heart of gold after all.
How I felt about it. If a sum of minor to major crimes merits a death sentence, then Graham deserved what she got. But as a woman, a death sentence made her a celebrity. This cynical exploitation and celebration of femme fatale is understood best by Chicago and not La Femme Nikita.
Dance with a Stranger and Dancing in the Dark also deal with killer women who are executed for their crimes. In each case, audience sympathy is asked since they had been done wrong. Why, Graham wasn't even there (so she says). And if she's stupid enough not to cut a deal, or to confess to an obvious informant, does that warrant a death sentence?
Of course, it's the rest of us law abiders who die. Graham lives on forever as the bad girl heroine of I Want to Live!. A more honest evaluation of the death penalty is Dead Man Walking, where the executed man eventually admits to being a heinous murderer. Or John Hurt's character in 10 Rillington Place, a completely innocent but stupid and clueless person. Such a non-entity also takes the rap in The Thin Blue Line, although this person was at least eventually freed.
For her turn as Barbara Graham, Hayward won a Best Actress Oscar, an award given regularly for playing against type. A class act is convincing as a gangster moll, although one that never takes drugs or abuses or neglects her small child (as if). To do so would make her unsympathetic. But if she writes bad checks to feed her family, or lies to protect a friend, well, that's not so bad.
It is interesting how nice the prison employees are to the condemned woman. They light her cigarettes, entertain her lies, let her choose the radio station, let her dress like a cover girl, and express sorrow for her plight. They even let her wear high heels for her final walk to the gas chamber. But they'll push her in there if they have to. So sorry, just doing my job. The Nazis had the same excuse.