Customer Reviews

Human Desire [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - Spain ]

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ATTENTION film purists: Please don't tell me this is not as good as Jean Renoir's 1938 La Bete Humaine starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. Let's agree to accept that as a given.

However, looking at Fritz Lang's Human Desire from 1954 on its own merits, I think the film is well directed, perfectly cast, well paced and entertaining. It stands up even in the jaded 21st century.

Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford deliver the goods with strong although admittedly one dimensional performances. However, Gloria Grahame [Hollywood's queen of the tramps]steals the show with a carefully nuanced depiction of the bad girl trapped in a bad marriage with an abusive and menacing guy. She needs to be strong yet vulnerable; repellingly slutty yet attractively sensitive; despicable yet sympathetic. She is walking a dramtic tightrope for 90 minutes and she pulls it off!

I enjoyed the ride and the film improves with repeated viewings. I recommend it as a must see for film noir aficionados.

Noir Fan

This movie is of great interest to fans of 1950s railroad operations. The big star is an Alco FA-1 diesel locomotive. There is a fair amount of rail action throughout the film...and the underlying sinister plots of blackmail and murder play out well.

Columbia Pictures presents "HUMAN DESIRE" (1954) ~ (91 min/B&W) ~~ Starring: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan & Kathleen Case

Directed by Fritz Lang

Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) needs the intervention of his beautiful wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) to keep his job, so Vicki meets with Carl's boss Owens (Grandon Rhodes), and Carl's job is secure. Insanely jealous, Carl finds Vicki with Owens on board a train and kills Owens. Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) just back from Korea and now a train engineer protects Vicki and they begin an affair - all the more complicating the situation and leading to disastrous developments

Lang & Ford had previously combined for The Big Heat (1953) ~ Check out my review on Amazon ~ The Big Heat

* Special footnote: ~~ Gloria Grahame's part was originally intended for Rita Hayworth ~~ Fritz Lang had desperately wanted Peter Lorre to play Jeff Warren, but Lang had treated Lorre so abusively during the making of M that the actor refused.

** The cast, direction and film is very good, but the Goodtimes video picture and sound is low quality...but still watchable!

BIOS:
1. Fritz Lang [Director]
Date of Birth: 5 December 1890 - Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
Date of Death: 2 August 1976 - Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California

2. Glenn Ford (aka: Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford)
Date of Birth: 1 May 1916 - Sainte-Christine, Quebec, Canada
Date of Death: 30 August 2006 - Beverly Hills, Los Angeles County, California

3. Gloria Grahame [aka: Gloria Hallward]
Date of Birth: 28 November 1923 - Los Angeles, California
Date of Death: 5 October 1981 - New York City, New York

4. Broderick Crawford
Date of Birth: 9 December 1911 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Date of Death: 26 April 1986 - Rancho Mirage, California

5. Edgar Buchanan
Date of Birth: 20 March 1903 - Humansville, Missouri
Date of Death: 4 April 1979 - Palm Desert, California

6. Kathleen Case [aka: Catherine Walker]
Date of Birth: 31 July 1933 - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Date of Death: 22 July 1979 - North Hollywood, California

Mr. Jim's Ratings:
Quality of Picture & Sound: 3 Stars
Performance: 5 Stars
Story & Screenplay: 5 Stars
Overall: 4 Stars [Original Music, Cinematography & Film Editing]

Total Time: 91 min on VHS ~ Columbia Pictures ~ (December 18, 1996)

No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that "speak" to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, as here femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1954, Human Desire, offer both those and, additionally, the pedigree of a story-line based closely on the work of 19th century French writer, Emil Zola (he of Dreyfus case fame), and directed by German expressionist film director, Fritz Lang, with his flare for great and dramatic use of black and white cinematography. This film while not right up there with the top of the line Out Of The Past, Gilda and The Big Sleep, partially for chemistry factors between the lead characters and heaviness of plot line in places, is just a notch below. In other words you had better take an hour and a half and watch this thing.

A little summary of the plot line is in order to set the stage. Obviously Zola's work was set in 19th century emerging bourgeois society France rather than 1950s post- World War II red scare America. But the tale he had to tell of thwarted love. love gone wrong, love never on the right track, and in the end, a cautionary tale of how far certain people will go, dare I say even to murder, sums up the range of human conditions, when the human body heat is up. And the body heat rising here is nothing less than sexual desire. Of course. Simply said a certain femme fatale, a certain speedy femme fatale as it turns out, played by 1950s B-movie fixture, Gloria Grahame, tired of trying to make do behind a cigarette counter does what any girl would do in the situation, marries a "big lug," a railroad middle-level management big lug guy who loves his booze, played by Broderick Crawford (he of All The King's Men fame), in order to get out from under. But speedy femme fatales are not built for the slow, big lug life, especially when they have a little past, a little past as they always do, here as a former, maybe former, mistress of a Mayfair swell. Needless to say he, as the plot unrolls and big lug Crawford proves to be less a catch than anticipated, gets jealous when he finds out that said wifey has two-timed him. And big lugs know only one way, or seem to know only one way too deal with their two-timing wives, kill the lover, naturally, kill him here right in front of wifey and make her complicit in the murder, holding a certain piece of evidence to put the frame on her, put the frame on her big time, if she crosses him.

All of that is so much lead-up to the real story though. Two-timing femme fatales, whether they got their start behind a candy counter, a hat-check counter or cigarette counter, do not survive in this wicked old world without being primo man-traps. Man-traps that can wrap a guy, wrap a guy tight, very tight, and get him to do anything, anything at all, including, dare I say it, murder. Enter one returning Korean War GI, played by Glenn Ford, who on returning home to small-town Anytown, U.S.A. just wants to wash the grit of that experience off and continue his prior work as a railroad engineer moving goods and passengers along the quickly declining rails of 1950s America. And dream the dream of finding a good woman and grabbing a slice of the little white house with a picket fence, 2.2 kids and a dog, named Rover, probably. And, of course, she is there in the background.

But enter one two-timing femme fatale trying to get out from under a possible murder rap, out from under a loser husband, and who, well, looks like she might be a very nice little adventure, a very nice little adventure, indeed, especially once Glenn gets a whiff of that perfume, lights that cigarette, and takes dead aim at those ruby red lips (I assume they are ruby red, this is after all a black and white noir). Ya, she has him hook, line and sinker. Has him that is until "crunch time." Then we shall see.

Naturally, in these crime noir melodramatic plots the need to put a big gap between good and evil is usually served up by there being a "good girl" counterposed to the femme fatale. That is the case here and is, in the end what stops old Glenn from going over the edge. But still I blame Glenn for most of the problems here. Yes, sure I wouldn't have minded taking dead aim at those Grahame lips, who could blame a guy, a small town America guy, especially once she put on the full-court press with that cooing voice. Whee! But see Glenn has already been down this road before. He played Johnny to Rita Hayworth's Gilda in the 1946 movie of the same name so he knows, or should be presumed to know, what happens when you take dead aim at those femme fatale lips. Here's the "skinny" though- average joes, very average train engineer joes included, should keep fifty yards, no fifty miles, away from blonde (although they are not always blondes) femme fatales when they get that "come hither" look in their eyes. You have been warned.

WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT DETAILS

Overall, in flight, this film is less than convincing, but it pulls off a surprisingly impressive entry into the water. The reason is that Fritz Lang suddenly turns a somersault - or his plot does - and the moral bearings the viewer has comfortably settled into are dumped on his head right at the end. The Glenn Ford character is transformed from nice war veteran-careless lover-murder conspirator, who sees the light, to a heel, who leaves a woman in fear of her life to the ministrations of her murderous husband. The woman, played by the excellent Gloria Grahame, turns from amoral seducer-adulterer to a feminist statement of ruined girl trying and failing to get the world's hypocrisy off her back. Her death is more like a suicide. All of this occurs in the last five minutes, so it is as if Lang has been playing a game with his audience, or it's an act of subversion he needed to slip past the producers/studio, who thought they were getting bad-girl-nearly-but-not-quite-ruins-good-boy. As film noir? Well, by the 1950s the genre had gone rather grey, and so is this example. As a suspense, it has passages of good plotting but then steps off the gas and meanders. An odd film, only made interesting because of the subversive contortions of a director who had done it all before, and wasn't content with a swan dive...

"Human Desire" was adapted to a contemporary setting from Emile Zola's 1890 novel "La Bete humaine". Director Fritz Lang represents its human encounters and entanglements as an omnipresent web of criss-crossing train tracks. Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) has just returned to his old job as a railway engineer after 3 years at war in Korea. Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) works in the same rail yard until his violent temper costs him his job. But Carl knows that his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) is acquainted with a Mr. Owens, whose influence could get him his job back. Carl begs Vicki to ask Mr. Owens for the favor. She reluctantly consents, but Carl's violent temper rears its ugly head again when he suspects that Vicki traded sexual favors for his job.

Carl seems always to push his wife into the arms of other men and then blame her. Vicki is a calculating woman, at the same time victim and femme fatale, who sees no alternative but to try to turn her frustrating circumstances to her advantage. They deadlock when Carl uses a letter that would implicate Vicki in murder to hold her hostage in their marriage, and she retaliates by refusing him any affection. Meanwhile, Vicki has bewitched the one witness who might incriminate her, Jeff Warren, into falling in love with her. Although Jeff is the "noir protagonist" in this film, a man caught between his own desires and what's good for him, he is not the strongest character, so his predicament does not drive the film.

Vicki and Carl, both unattractive characters, propel the story. Where Carl's inability to conceal or control his anger are his undoing, Vicki's emotions are equally strong but kept bottled, sublimated into her machinations. Beyond the base characterizations of these two villainous types, the way "Human Desire" views Vicki is interesting. This film was made in 1954, and it goes out of its way to portray the adulteress in the worst light possible, worse than that of the murderer. Vicki seems to be cast in a harsher light than her actions merit. I put this down to post-war misogyny and fear of sex. Vicki is neither as cunning nor as successful as the femme fatales of the previous decade. She usually just does the obvious, but self-preservation with a sexual twist is enough to condemn her here.

I'm generally willing to forgive old movies, and particularly old films noir, a lot. But this flick just goes way beyond forgivability (forgivableness?) in the unconvincing, unbelievable actions of its characters.

Broderick Crawford is introduced as an apparently nice guy. His wife (Gloria Grahame) is introduced as affectionate and supportive. Crawford gets fired from his job at a train yard, and asks his wife to put in a good word for him with a successful business man she knew before they were married. After she does so, suddenly Crawford is insanely jealous. After beating his wife, and without so much as a twitching eyelid, he cold-bloodedly plots the murder of the business man. Once the murder is done, his attitude is a hand-patting "well, that's that; let's get back to life as usual." Nothing has been shown to make you accept his character as this sort of raving psychopath; apparently this is supposed to be not-too-unusual behavior for a jealous husband. Meanwhile, Grahame is none too eager to get back to life as usual with Crawford, but she's "trapped," because he holds a note that he forced her to write to the murdered man. Huh? Finally, in the denouement of the story, Grahame decides to take revenge on her drunken and emotionally shattered husband by taunting him about her past sexual exploits. Not exactly something a sensible person would be likely to do with an insanely jealous and murderous husband.

On the plus side, the dark, maze-like train yard and the ominous, threatening power of the heavy locomotives make for some interesting noir imagery. And Gloria Grahame, with her odd voice and pursed lips, exudes an intense and slightly perverse sexuality that makes her fairly convincing in the femme fatale role she adopts toward Glenn Ford.

In all, not a worthless film, but perhaps one for film noir "completists" only.