
Though Jean Renoir’s The Human Beast has become the more well known and well respected film, Fritz Lang’s American remake Human Desire is an equally provocative film of fate, passion, and suspense. It lacks the ‘human beast’ of the protagonist of Jean Gabin, now in the form of your average joe of Glenn Ford. Lang instead shifts focus on the twisted relationships between Broderick Crawford and Gloria Grahame.
The story has changed to lower working class New Jersey railroad workers. Glenn Ford plays engineer Jeff Warren, a returning Korean war vet who looks forward to a peaceful life at home. Meanwhile, fellow worker Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) has been fired due to his violent behavior. He begs his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) to talk with a higher up, Owens, whom she once knew as a child to get his job back, but when he finds about her affair with this man, it ends up in murder on a train. It is on this night that both Jeff’s and the Buckley’s lives become bound together as Vicki must distract Jeff in order for her husband to escape the scene of the crime. From that point on, Jeff gets involved in a rough passionate affair with Vicki, whose mind is set on the murder of Carl, who holds incriminating evidence against her on the murder. Lying her way through the seduction, Jeff finally wises up, and unknowingly leaves Vicki to her death at the train.
Though Jeff may be the weakest character of the trio, he takes us back to the disillusioned vets of WWII who cannot adjust to the homefront once again. Though he at first feels optimistic to return to a domestic life and possibly a romance with his best friend’s daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case), the excitement he left behind Vicki brings back into his life through their torrid affair. Ellen, introduced as a buxom brunette, gets plainer and plainer throughout the movie as he gets deeper into the affair with Vicki. The 50’s domestic life just can’t keep up with the excitement.
Gloria Grahame’s performance here is a hit and miss, but remains one of her most memorable roles. Her theatrics are a little too much in certain scenes, especially as she tries to tell Jeff of the murder and the abuse Carl has put her through, but during the scenes with Crawford we can see a deeply sexually frustrated woman who has found herself trapped into a marriage with a man who keeps her as a prized trophy rather than a wife.
Completing the deadly trio is Broderick Crawford, playing a fuse that could snap at any given moment. He brings over the uncontrollable rage of Jean Gabin from the original and gives a menacing performance. He prostitutes his wife to get what he wants, and yet is too stupid to realize she has a big sexual appetite.
Lang fully explores the entire space of the train. The cramped corridors look have become a labyrinth with no way out and compartments have become places of entrapment that lead the characters to their own doomed fate. The loud noise of the train makes two murders go unnoticed, and at one point leaves Jeff alone with his thoughts of the affair, unable to speak to anyone during his daily route.
Burnett Guffey brings out Lang’s deep shadows and expressionistic images on to screen, he would also lense other classic noirs such as The Reckless Moment, My Name is Julia Ross, and In a Lonely Place, and would later win an Oscar for Bonnie and Clyde. Daniele Amfitheatrof provides a menacing score, one of noir’s best, a harder edged version of something of Miklós Rózsa.
It’s hard to garner up respect when Human Desire has to live up to Émile Zola’s source material, Jean Renoir’s original, AND the first Lang-Ford-Grahame pairing of The Big Heat. But this is still a Fritz Lang film, plenty of doom, grittiness, and pure noir abound. Human Desire brings together the gritty realism of The Big Heat and Fury and the German Expressionism of M and Scarlet Street. It is certainly the master’s most underrated and undervalued picture because of what it has to live up to.