Directed by: Fritz Lang.
Written by: Alfred Hayes based on the novel by Émile Zola.
Starring: Glenn Ford (Jeff Warren), Gloria Grahame (Vicki Buckley), Broderick Crawford (Carl Buckley), Edgar Buchanan (Alec Simmons), Kathleen Case (Ellen Simmons), Peggy Maley (Jean), Diane DeLaire (Vera Simmons), Grandon Rhodes (John Owens).
Fritz
Lang reteamed with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame a year after the trio made one
of the best film noirs in history with The Big Heat, to make another great
noir, Human Desire in 1954. This film’s reputation is nowhere near as great as
The Big Heat, which could be due to a number of reasons. One is that the ending
of Human Desire, while wholly appropriate to the story, doesn’t quite pack the
same thrill as the ending of The Big Heat. Another reason could be that Jean
Renoir had already adapted Emile Zola’s highly regarded novel, La Bete Humaine,
in 1938, and while Human Desire is a great film, Renoir’s film is a flat out
masterpiece. But for whatever reason, Human Desire has never really been
counted as one of Lang’s best films – not even one of his best American noirs –
and that’s a shame, because it is a great movie.
The
plot involves Jeff Warren (Ford), who has just come back from the Korean War,
and wants nothing more than to return to his old job as a railroad engineer,
meet a nice girl and settle down. The daughter of an associate, Vera (Diane
DeLaire), pretty much throws herself at Ford, but he is hesitant. It isn’t that
she isn’t beautiful, or even that she is the daughter of a friend, but more
because he knew her as a kid, and he hasn’t quite gotten over that yet.
Besides, there is another woman who has her eyes on Jeff. This is Vicki (Gloria
Grahame), but she’s already married to the violent, jealous Carl (Broderick
Crawford), who works for the same railroad. The two of them meet because Jeff
is hitching a ride home on a late night train, that Vicki and Carl are also
taking, but for more sinister reasons. Carl has just lost his job, and needs
Vicki’s contact with a rich man to get it back. But Carl is not impressed when
Vicki spends too much time with the rich man – deducing that more than talk
went on. They are on the train so that Carl can take his revenge on the rich
man – which he does. He then sends Vicki to distract Jeff, so that he can make
it back to his compartment, before anyone catches him with the body. But when
Jeff’s eyes meet Vicki, he is lost, and she knows it. She thinks that perhaps
she has found her way out of an abusive marriage. After all, Jeff has killed
before, in the army, so why would killing Carl be so different?
Lang’s
best films exist in a moral grey area. Most films of the era have things in
strictly black and white terms – these are the good guys, and these are the bad
guys – but in Lang’s films, they get all messed up. His best film may well be M
(1931), where a child murderer (Peter Lorre) is on the loose, and the corrupt
police and politicians cannot stop him, so the underground does it for them.
These are criminals and murderers themselves, but even they are disgusted by a
child murderer in their midst. No one is innocent, but some just simply aren’t
as bad as others. The same thing is at work in Human Desire. Jeff may be on
shaky moral ground for killing in war (it depends on how you see war), but he
certainly crosses a line when he begins an affair with Vicki. But will his
morals allow him to go a step further, and kill Carl, who after all, is a
murderer and a brute himself? While Vicki fits the mold of the femme fatale,
she isn’t quite as evil as someone like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity,
who convinces innocent Fred MacMurray to kill her husband for her. After all,
Vicki is an abused woman, who was drawn into the murder plot by her husband,
and is now being kept by him through violence and cohesion. She isn’t innocent,
but you can at least relate to her motives.
The
performances certainly help to make the movie great. The whole movie is about
the basest of human desires – lust and rage – and yet no one ever talks about
either one. It all simmers just underneath the surface. Ford was never the most
charismatic of actors – he more often than not was a little stiff and square –
but Lang knew how to use him at his best, as he does here. That stiffness works
for Jeff, who afterall, is supposed to be an everyman, undone by his desires.
Broderick Crawford was an actor of enormous girth, but also the power to go
along with it. We need little convincing that he is a brute. Best of all is
Gloria Grahame, one of the most underrated of the actresses from the 1950s. To
say her personal life was stormy would be an understatement – while married to
director Nicholas Ray, she had an affair with his 13 year old son, who she
later married (in total, she had four marriages). Yet on screen, in such films
as In a Lonely Place (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), The Big Heat
(1953) and here, she was pretty much perfect, playing damaged women, who draw
the men in their lives to their doom.
Fritz
Lang was one of the best, and most prolific, of all directors. His films are dark
and unsettling and stick in your mind for long after they are finished. It is
true that Jean Renoir’s La Bete Humaine, with Jean Gabin, is a better film than
Human Desire, but that shouldn’t detract from what Lang and company achieved
with this film – a masterful noir in its own right.
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