Powerful

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Grace (Suzanne Pleshette) is an over-sexed teenage debutante when the story begins...so much so that she's earned quite the reputation. However, when she meets nice-guy Sidney (Bradford Dillman) she forsakes her wicked ways and promises to make him a good wife. Well, this is the case...for a couple years. However, Grace not only has a strong sex drive but a strong drive towards sex destruction. Soon, she begins a purely sexual affair with a neighbor (Ben Gazzara). He wants there to be more to it than that...so she drops him and heads off for her next conquest! Ultimately, however, her wicked ways catch up to her and she finds that great husband, home and baby she's worked for slipping out of her fingers.This is an enjoyable, albeit sleazy, soap opera. It's the sort of film that must have seemed pretty steamy back in the day, though by modern standards it's relatively tame. Pleshette and the rest of the cast give it their best and it is quite entertaining trash.

Suzanne Pleshette, who recently died, gave a truly memorable performance in this 1965 film. To say that promiscuity is her problem is to put it mildly.From high school to her married years, she as an attraction for other men that will ultimately lead to her downfall as well as others.Her mother can't take it so she proceeds to drop dead during a vacation with her daughter. Her new former lover, Ben Gazzara, can't take being thrown over. In a drunken rage, he beats up a woman he meets at a hotel only to be killed in a wild chase scene with police.It appears that Pleshette finally finds happiness with husband Bradford Dillman. They have a beautiful son before she takes up with Gazzara.Peter Graves is also effective as an earlier lover with an insanely jealous wife. Though Graves never carried on with Pleshette while she was married, the wife can't be convinced of this.The fault with this film lies at the end. We are left up in the air once Dillman is led to believe that she has carried on with Graves. His running out in a rage is not reconciled. Can Pleshette try to pull a Scarlett O'Hara and try to get him back?

***SPOILERS*** The movie "A Rage to Live" is based on a John O'Hara novel about a young socialite Grace Cardwell, Suzanne Pleshette,who just can't stay away from men to the point where she's practically ostracized from her high society circles by an outraged group of parents who's sons she's accused of "corrupting". Grace's widowed mom Emily Cardwell, Carmen Mathews, tries to deal with her daughters problems and after a very emotionally packed exchange that ended with Grace telling her mom that she'll always be with her and try to make her proud of being her daughter her mom collapses in the living room from a stroke. Trying to live a normal life with sex only when she's married for Grace wasn't easy but for her mom's sake she tried as hard as she could. One night when they were both on vacation Grace snuck out of their hotel room and has a tryst with one of the busboys. When she came back later that night she found, to her great shock, her mom dead on the floor from a heart attack. Grace holding herself responsible for her mom's death. Even though her mothers doctor Dr. O'Brien, James Gregory, told her that her mom had a very weak heart and that her night out with the busboy had nothing to do with her death. Later she finally found the man of her dreams Sidney Tate, Bradford Dillman, a stock turned real estate broker from San Francisco. Telling him the truth about herself, her wild life-style that she long ago abandoned, only impressed Sidney even more because of her honesty and married her and had a child, a boy, with him. Everything was going swell until contractor Roger Bannon, Ben Gazzara, came over to the house to fix the barn. Roger had a crush on Grace ever since he met her some five years ago and now out of the army and working for himself wanted her to light the torch that he held for her all those years. Forcing himself on Grace she gave in and had an affair with him but later tried to break it off which led Roger to go insane. One night he get very drunk with a hooker at a motel and almost killed her. Screaming Grace's name and what a tramp she is, Roger thought that Grace left him for handsome news editor Jack Hollister, Peter Graves, he runs out of the motel and drives his truck into a tree killing himself. Hollister who tried to have an affair with Grace but was kindly rebuffed by her feels guilty about the whole mess and it makes his wife Amy, Bethel Leslie, suspect that he's having an affair with Grace and that drives her to drink and almost kill herself. All this leads to where Grace's husband Sidney finds out about her affair with Roger in the newspaper and leaves her. Sidney later changes his mind when Grace tells him that the affair with Roger was only a more or less one night stand and that was the only time that she cheated on him. The movie ends at a social gathering with an almost unbearable confrontation with Amy and Grace where she accuses Grace of stealing her husband Jack. Grace's stunned husband Sidney present at the scene took away the gun that Amy pulled out and tried to shoot herself with then walking away from Grace, with their baby boy, and from out of her life forever. Grace in the end is left a broken and crying women who lost everything that she loved in the world. I found the film "A Rage to Live" not sleazy at all even though it's subject matter was highly explosive in the sleaze department. The writing directing and acting, especially that of young Miss. Pleshette, made the movie both touching and interesting without the sensationalism that you would have expected from a movie like the movie that it was.

"A Rage to Live" had beautiful, haunting theme music which crept in at just the right moments. The story of Grace Caldwell, a beautiful young girl with a "problem," not unlike most men, everywhere, she loved sex and had no control over her actions. She was a nympho.Women like Grace are scorned and hated by other women, because men are so drawn to her type -- women who crave sex just like men. There wasn't a lot of "dating and cat and mouse" with a girl like Grace. A brief look into her eyes and the next stop was the bedroom.Personally, I felt sorry for Grace after her marriage to Bradford Dillman and the birth of her child. She seemed truly happy. Into her life walks Ben Gazzara, with a bulging crotch and sexy Italian bravado. Much too much for Grace to resist, especially when he tells her that he has the hots for her. Obviously, Grace is not getting the KIND of sex she craves: cheap, tawdry, motel sex with strange men. Well, that's what she got with Ben, but he was mentally "off" and easily fell in love with Caldwell. Trying to break off the affair with Gazarra, she tells him, "You knew what this was. I have a husband and child that I love." His response, of course, is to call her a "dirty slut" and a "rotten, filthy whore!"Ben is not the only man that is after Grace. Every man she comes across "knows" her and "her kind." Unfortunately, it's difficult for her to say "no." Even on a vacation with her mother, who has a bad heart, Grace sneaks out in the middle of the night to have tawdry sex with a hotel worker. She copulates with a college buddy of her brother's, plus, it was insinuated that she had "entertained" other men.The ending is sad, especially because her husband deserts her after a drunken, jealous wife accuses Grace of "sleeping" with her husband (Peter Graves.) After calling Grace a "tramp," the woman breaks down in tears and tells Bradford that her husband "admitted it!!!"Susanne Pleshette was wonderful. Her performance was as good as any other actress's in 1965, certainly better than Liz Taylor's in 1960's "Butterfield 8." Perhaps if Grace had been a prostitute, the role would have been more appealing to the Academy. They just LOVE giving Oscars to actresses who play ladies of the evening. Nymphomania, obviously, is too strong for their coffee.Too bad Susanne didn't become a major movie star -- she certainly had the looks and the talent.I'd love to have this on DVD. And, that THEME music was lovely.