Early on there is an excruciating scene where a completely unnecessary and extremely annoying office boy is invited to upstage Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden with a painfully un-funny bit concerning who ordered what sandwich. Nobody is claiming that last sandwich he went out and got and boy is he steamed! You would think that he was one of the stars of the film considering how much the camera focuses on him, but he never appears again and you never do find out about that sandwich! And never mind that his obnoxious whining drowns out crucial expository information that is supposed to set into motion the events that make up the remainder of the film. This is right on the heels of Stanwyck's advice columnist having a conversation with a grumpy editor who mumbles his dialogue unintelligibly. For the first ten minutes, I was going "What?" and "Huh?" and "Who?" to no avail, and I knew I was in for a real endurance test.<br /><br />Awkwardly scripted and filmed, and deadly dull, "Crime Of Passion" is sort of a pre-feminist tantrum about a driven career woman who unwisely falls for a hulking, middle class police detective (Hayden), quits her newspaper job, feels suffocated by her mundane suburban existence and conceives some baffling scheme to improve their prospects. The movie is little more than a series of drab parties and horribly unexciting phone conversations. The highlights would probably have to be the two thrilling scenes where a car pulls into a parking garage, the passengers climb out and then slowly walk away from it.<br /><br />Though she was able to pull it off just a few years before in "Clash by Night" and "Jeopardy", by 1957 Stanwyck was now 50 years old and simply no longer convincing as a sultry love interest. Uncomfortably brittle and hysterical, she is unable to meet the basic requirements of her role, although I guess you have to give her credit for trying at this stage of her legendary career. At his worst, Hayden often looked like he was being forced to act in this type of B grade fare against his wishes, as if perhaps a close family member was being held hostage and wouldn't be set free until the final day of shooting.<br /><br />This is also incorrectly classified as a Film-Noir. In order to qualify as Noir, a film has to be of at least average quality. If it's anything less than average it's just a bad movie about crime. The only interesting thing about this movie would have to be a few surprisingly bold alternative lifestyle references, considering the year it was made. (They come in the first 15 minutes and while never explicitly stated, they're pretty hard to miss.) <br /><br />