AudioFileZ First billing on Human Desire goes to Glenn Ford, but he's somewhat eclipsed by Gloria Grahame. Grahame as Vicky Buckley is a cross between a femme fa tale and a bullied and oppressed wife. While not a classic beauty she exudes a kind of striking combination of a sultry sexuality and a "girl next door" with a babyish voice to further complicate the juxtaposition. She most definitely can play the role she's given here standing toe-to-toe with both Ford and Broderick Crawford as her husband Carl. Vicky is at once damaged, devious, and extremely manipulative and Grahame delivers it in spades. Human Desire is a combination of film noir and a romantic drama. Named quite correctly the movie shows how certain innate desires can trip up otherwise solid people. Without haste the marriage between Carl and Vicky becomes a loveless match of wills. Even though Carl suspects Vicky of having an affair with the older wealthy John Owens he forces Vicky to meet him and ask for his influence in getting back the job Carl lost. This sets up Carl's rage when he once more accuses Vicky of a tryst with Owens as she was simply gone too long.In a jealous calculated murder plot Carl gets the upper hand on his wife with a note in order to lure Owens into a trap. It's implied he knows he is going to kill Owens while holding the letter framing Vicky. Carl will, thus, prevent Vicky from leaving for fear of being implicated in the murder.. But, instead of controlling his wife Carl is losing her to returning veteran and railroad engineer Jeff Warren played by Glenn Ford. Warren becomes intertwined in the whole mess by a kiss with Vicky Buckley prior to knowing who and what she is. Before he can figure out he is getting played, Warren decides to testify in an inquiry that he couldn't identify the passenger (Vicky) he may have witnessed, possibly involved in the murder of John Owens. Now, Jeff Warren is in deep being blinded by his budding love (i.e. lust) for Vicky, much to her design. Things get messier before Warren gets his own personal reality check as he truly contemplates murdering Carl Buckley to both save Vicky and have her for his wife. This plays out quite well as the love triangle of Carl, Vicky, and Jeff Warren comes to a critical mass. There's a good twist at the end when at least Vicky, who loses Warren, thinks she's, at least, free of Carl.While no classic, this is a solid movie with good elements of film noir and romantic drama. Director Fritz Lang may have been slumming just a little, though Grahame's performance stands tall. Ford is realistic as the otherwise "nice-guy" who gets snowed. Broderick, typically wooden, brings that unsympathetic bully quality needed for the dark matter to spring forth from. These three get nice support from Warren's fatherly co-worker Alec, played by the crusty character actor Edgar Buchanan (uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction fame) and his overly sweet and beautiful daughter Ellen played by Kathleen Case (Jeff's potential other love interest).This isn't a classic movie due to several factors such as less than stellar dialog and, perhaps, general lack of imagination. But, it is a quite strong film due to the strength of Grahame as Vicky Buckley in playing out of that age old story of a love triangle with a murder in the middle As such is gets a definite recommendation.

Robert J. Maxwell From Zola, by way of Renoir, Fritz Lang's "Human Desire" becomes a story of love, hatred, murder, lust, and more murder in and around a railroad marshaling yard.Broderick Crawford is the hulking drunk who is morbidly jealous of his younger and horny wife, Gloria Grahame. Crawford has murdered a big shot who has shown interest in Grahame, and he makes her write a letter incriminating herself. The letter is a chain that shackles her to him. But they've reached that point in a marriage at which the husband comes home from work, the wife stands up from the dinner table and leaves the room. They don't sleep together. They don't speak. The hatred is incandescent. Well, at least hers is. He's still jealous and thick headed and he will never let her go.Enter handsome bland young Glenn Ford, returning to his job as brakeman on a locomotive after a stint in the Korean War. Ellen Case is a pleasant and appealing young woman who lives in the same boarding house and she develops a crush on Ford. Ford is not very interested. He's more interested in Grahame who exudes heat.Grahame has no trouble seducing the rather dull Ford. And she soon begins asking him suggestive questions. "You're a soldier. You must have killed men. Is it very difficult to kill someone? How about my husband?" I just made that last question up, but if Ford weren't so stupid he'd get the picture sooner than he does.However, it finally comes to him, after Grahame has lured him into her web. Let's see. Ford and Grahame are in love and want to get married. But then there the burly Broderick in the way. He's blackmailing Grahame into staying with him. So a reluctant Ford begins stalking his friend and co-worker through the dismal railroad yards one night, a heavy iron weapon in his hand. Crawford has quite a load on and should hardly notice it when his occiput is bashed in. At this point, and a bit earlier, it sounds a little like "Double Indemnity." But it's not as polished and taut a production as "Double Indemnity," nor is the movie-star-handsome Glenn Ford a good substitute for Jean Gabin with his creased and exhausted features. Ford in his railroad outfit isn't dirty enough.Gloria Grahame always suggests sex -- of some bizarre kind. She's at her best as a flirty and slightly mysterious babe who is almost comic in her sensuality. She was extremely good, for instance, in her role in "Crossfire," especially in her almost surreal scenes with Paul Kelly. But this is a straight dramatic role. And 1954 is not 1945, so she seems a little used, in a depressing way.The gloom isn't helped by the production design. Nice shots of tracks criss-crossing and whistles warning ball-playing kids to get out of the way. But those 1950s working-class apartments. Boxes within boxes. All the rooms, all the decor, all the kickshaws, reflective of an organized wholesomeness that is fake. I wouldn't live in one of those places. I'd rather live under one of the beds. The overall ethos is one of a witting, impending doom. If one of the characters saw a light at the end of the tunnel, he'd run out and get more tunnel.

MisterWhiplash Film noir is a mood, a state of mind in a film world. It doesn't just have to be guys with guns, nor is it just infidelity and murder. But it usually rests on dark streets and in rooms with the lights off, with sultry women, average Joes and Big Heavys who are the bane of any person's existence, and sometimes it's just based on the narration, the setting, the way a character stares at one another or holds on a kiss. Human Desire, Fritz Lang's update of Emile Zola's book La bete Humaine (and also made into the wonderful film of the same name by Jean Renoir, a kind of pre-noir example in the 30's), is drenched in noir, and it's a wonderful example of what could be done with the right actors - or seemingly the right ones all the way through - and the right setting. It's set among workers on trains, as an engineer, Jeff, played by Glenn Ford, comes back from Korea and is back a work, a nice but quiet type usually, and also works with Broderick Crawford's Carl. Carl is a big louse of a man, jealous as hell of his wife but contradictory in that he asks him to do a 'favor' in order to get his job back from his wife. She goes to see this boss-man, but Crawford ain't havin' it: he goes ahead and kills the guy on a train, and Glenn Ford's character suspects something, having seen Vicki come out of the same car. But he also kinda, sorta, falls for her, if only by a sudden kiss moment, and she tries to egg him on to 'get rid' of Carl, who has become a total drunk and waste after killing a man. Some guys just can't take it, but can Jeff go that far? And for a dame?Sounds like a book title (matter of fact it was at some point), but it's how Lang presents these characters, in shadows and among the grime of the trains and tracks, and those dark rooms, that make things interesting. It's also good that there's a side character here, Ellen, played by Kathleen Case, as a way of giving some pause from the main plot (she's a younger woman who takes a fancy to Jeff as he comes back from the East and has a kimono for her). Lang makes us wonder: is this dame Vicki Jeff's only choice? Hopefully not, but the dilemma makes for some great chemistry for the two actors, and the tension is ratcheted up as Jeff has to ponder taking the next step for Vicki, or to not, as Carl isn't a stranger to him and this isn't fighting in a war. Ford is fine in the role he's in, and Crawford gets to ham it up with his drunken a-hole of a husband who occasionally shows signs of regret (he's not all black-and-white morally, but as in noir has shades of grays). But with Grahame I wasn't totally sure about her performance, at least at first. She's playing something different than her previous Lang role in The Big Heat where she was just a full-on moll. Here she's a housewife, but one with a checkered past we don't know of entirely till near the final reel. She acts a little duplicitous, but I wasn't always believing her acting even if she looked the part of a femme fatale. It's a strange thing since she isn't bad in the role, just inconsistent, and it was mostly due to some good chemistry with Ford (who he himself is a little stiff in a non-bad-ass-villain role but stuff dependable) that I could believe her in the part.Lang also gets some moments for "pure" cinema, that is without much dialog and just the physical locations and scenes, like how Jeff just motions for a cigarette and drives away as the engineer on the train, or how he tracks Carl one night coming back from a bar drunk. And sometimes the body language and way shots are framed tells a lot about the disconnect of these people: in the aftermath of the murder, one night we see Carl and Vicki at home having dinner, very torn apart, and how they're placed in the house, separated by kitchen and living room or on other side, tells a lot about where they're at even when they don't say much. Things like that, or how Jeff and Vicki are lit outside by the tracks at night contemplating their love/lust for one another, is done with such emotion that is just fine.Other times there is some melodrama, and, again, Crawford does ham it up in some scenes to where it comes close to unintentional hilarity (the crowd I saw the movie with laughed at a few key moments that would've probably been dead-silent back in the day, but this may be more for the change in times than anything else). If it's not quite as great as Renoir's film it's that it's not aiming as high artistically, I think. Renoir's film is a tragic romance, while this is more of a B-thriller with some aspirations for high artistry. It's not to say it's a pale imitation of that film, but it's just different. Lang's world is a bit colder, more cynical, more un-trusting of what humanity is capable of except the occasional good and usually evil tasks. No one character in Human Desire gets off the hook (except maybe Ellen), but the varying degrees makes for a strong comment on post-war morality, a defining characteristic between Lang and Renoir's adaptations.In other words, Human Desire is cool and brutal and more than a bit sexy, and if it's not all great there's enough here for buffs to chew on.

dougdoepke This feature was made near the end of Lang's career in America, and it appears the longer he stayed, the less inspired he got. In my book, no amount of train track symbolism can compensate for such generally lackluster results, given the story potential. Ten years earlier, Lang proved his way with wanton women and driven men in the sublime Scarlet Street (1945). Here, however, with similar ingredients, the mix never gels into anything more memorable than a programmer, leaving us instead with bits and pieces of what might have been.Now, Glenn Ford proved he could do interestingly ambivalent characters as in The Big Heat (1953). Nonetheless, his working stiff Jeff Warren is just that—too stiff to be convincing as the wayward fall guy for Vicki's dark scheme. As an actor, Ford always understated, but here the low-key is carried to a fault, creating a basically dull and uninteresting character. It also doesn't help that his character is rather poorly written, as other reviewers have pointed out. Then there's Crawford, who had generally one single screen persona—a loudmouth boor. As a killer, he's fine; as a guy that even the needy Vicki might settle for, he's an unlikely stretch. That leaves the pouty-lipped vamping of Grahame's Vicki to carry the drama, which she does in a part I expect she could do in her sleep.At the same time, compare the visual styling here with that of the earlier Scarlet Street. The latter shows genuine expressionist artistry with light and shadow. This "noir", by contrast, comes across as one of the dullest grays on record. You know a noir is in trouble when the most interesting visuals are Canadian train tracks. Then too, I expect the cultural climate of the McCarthy year 1953 worked against both the script and Lang. As a result, we get the "good girl" (Ellen) subplot that dangles like a loose appendage. Its purpose, I suppose, is to provide a wholesome contrast to bad girl Vicki. The effect, however, is that of a weakening distraction. At the same time, the narrative could have used at least two revealing sex scenes. Some such would have brought out the vulnerable side of both Jeff and Carl, making their characters more interesting and their actions more believable. But, the period's paralyzing Production Code makes sure that we get nothing more than pallid hints of the real human desire that drives these characters to their doom.I haven't seen the Renoir original. But even within the Lang catalogue, the film's a disappointment. Given his career trajectory in America, it's hardly surprising that he chose to end film-making back in his native Germany.