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A reunion of director Fritz Lang and stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame after the previous year’s successful noir masterpiece, The Big Heat, but this one can’t help but feel a bit like a cooldown. There’s plenty of style to burn and a delicious pair of performances to thrill as often as they repel, but something about Human Desire just isn’t quite as compelling. It might have something to do with the wind dissipating from the sails before the final credits roll.
Maybe a better descriptor would be that the train runs out of steam before reaching the station as much Human Desire concerns railway workers. Based upon Emile Zola’s novel La bête humaine, Lang’s film is too stodgy for noir and too mean for literary adaptations occupying a fascinating netherworld where Grahame and Broderick Crawford give two of the greatest performances of their careers as a toxic, tragic married couple. This doesn’t mean Human Desire is a failure as a film, far from it as it’s a solid example of Lang’s craft, but that it’s a fascinating oddity that I strongly admired.
Ford is a bit of stiff drip as Jeff Warren, a Korean War veteran caught in sexual frenzy with Grahame’s complicated femme fatale and the object of affection for a bland good girl (Kathleen Case). While his decency could be properly projected to project tension and inward anger coiled inside a respectable exterior, he seems a bit too levelheaded to the pulpier aspects of the script. He’s essentially the straight man to the crazier, juicier supporting players.
Jeff crosses paths with Vicki (Grahame) while her husband (Crawford) commits a murder on a train. Vicki’s responsibility for the murder is questionable, but her marriage is a portrait of mutually assured destruction and abuse. Crawford’s big lug characters often seemed more bellow than follow-through. Not so here as Crawford’s Carl openly hits and repeatedly hits Vicki, demonstrates a murderous possessiveness, and nearly earns a modicum of sympathy with his pathetic displays of insecurity and neediness. It’s a marvel of acting that Crawford alternates between humanizing his abuser but never apologizes for him.
Just as complicated is Grahame’s ability to keep us somewhere between sympathy for her circumstances, revulsion at her actions, and enthralled with her bad behavior. This is what Grahame excelled at as an actress. She was at home in film noir and indispensable as a femme fatale. Her appearance added to the vibe and overall artistry of any production she was in, and some of her best work was with Lang in this film and The Big Heat. Her sultriness is at its ripest here, and her victim/victimizer character must be one of the best performances in her career.
It is in her and Crawford’s depiction that the sexual frenzy and animal lust so endemic to film noir exposes the rot inside the genre. Shame that it’s Ford’s innocent brought into their twisted back-and-forth that remains the central point-of-view. His character never really seems to lose his barring on the real world as he enters the twisty funhouse of Grahame and Crawford. Frankly, there doesn’t appear to be much internal struggle with his character. He moves through the motions too easily for a story so based in human emotions and base instincts.
Lang keeps a cool, nearly impassive eye on the proceedings, but Ford’s character leaves the film with a bitter aftertaste of a man done in by a “bitches be crazy” plot with a side order of virgin vs whore complex to boot. Compare Human Desire to The Big Heat’s triste on men going to power for purpose with a woman’s manipulations as mere pretense, and it’s no wonder that Human Desire has languished in its shadow. It’s still a fascinating misfire that often approaches near greatness.
