Murder Man and Crime of Passion

Tim Whelan's Murder Man(1935) and Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion (1957) are two low-budget films that each captures anxieties of its era.

Tim Whelan was an under-the-radar director of low-budget B pictures and Murder Man was Spencer Tracy's first film for MGM.  Tracy plays a newspaper man and dipsomaniac (his boss actually uses this term when he is looking for him in saloons, a term not often heard in films) who helps to find the murderer of a dubious businessman, the murderer being the financier's partner.  With Tracy's help the partner is tried and sentenced to the electric chair and when Tracy interviews him in Sing Sing he realizes he cannot go through with his plan, which was to murder the crooked businessman and frame his partner.  Tracy had killed the man and in the end confesses.  The woman who had killed herself at the beginning of the movie was Tracy's wife, who had left Tracy for the businessman and given the crook all their money.  The film functions as both a breezy newspaper story of the era and as a story about alcoholism, suicide, murder and despair, as well as something of a reminder that Tracy himself often went on alcoholic binges between pictures.  Virginia Bruce plays the sympathetic advice columnist on Tracy's newspaper who loves Tracy, though Tracy is too deep in alcoholism and misery to love her in return.

In Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion Barbara Stanwyck plays a woman advice columnist on a San Francisco newspaper who falls in love with a Los Angeles cop, played by Sterling Hayden.  She gives up her job to marry Hayden and moves to a box of a house in LA, where all the cops' wives get together to talk about clothes and recipes while the men play cards and drink beer.  Her own ambition thwarted, Stanwyck turns to promoting her husband's ambition, which he has little of himself. She has an affair with Hayden's boss, played by Raymond Burr, in the hopes of getting a promotion for her husband.  When the promotion doesn't happen Stanwyck kills Burr with a gun stolen from evidence and is eventually caught by her husband, the man assigned to investigate the crime. Gerd Oswald had a distinguished career in America and Germany making intense and dark dramas on low budgets.  Oswald and cinematographer Joesph LaShelle shoot through the bric-a-brac of homes in LA to capture the feeling of being trapped, felt by Stanwyck and, by extension, many women in the fifties in American who substituted their husband's ambition for their own