Well acted soap opera about how a wealthy young woman's nymphomania negatively impacts her life and the lives of people around her. Not that it doesn't take two to tango. However, she has a way of attracting men with no self control or moral fiber. Lovely Suzanne Pleshette is excellent in the role of the promiscuous woman. Ben Gazzara is also notable for his disturbingly slimy role. There's not much of a storyline; she has no control of her sexual compulsions throughout her life and does nothing about it despite the counsel of her family and friends. There aren't many likable characters in this movie making the movie itself hard to like. Not really my kind of movie but it's okay for this genre.

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?

Movie adaptations from John O'Hara never really get it right. Either they're not frank enough or they sentimentalize or they just plain don't have the budget to put his world on screen. He's very specific about the historical moment when his stories take place. "A Rage to Live" (like "From the Terrace" and "Butterfield 8" as well) is transposed to a later time. It really might have helped if it could have shown us the changing manners and mores of a very specific Pennsylvania world. What I mainly remember it for is one of the two flat-out sexiest performances by a male in the movies that I can readily recall. The other one is Ray Danton in "Too Much, Too Soon." Gazzara is hotter than blazes in his part. A few years ago, when the actor Harry Reems was extradited to Tennessee for appearing in a porn film shot elsewhere that just happened to be sold there, Gazzara was one of his most vocal defenders. He was no kid, Gazzara, but he said "I work out every day. My body is in WONDERFUL shape. And if I want to do a porn film, I want the right to do one." Any surprise that he was so sexy in this film, or in "The Strange One"?

***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.