Human Desire

HUMAN DESIRE has it all: a jealous husband (Broderick Crawford), his mousy but sensuous wife (Gloria Grahame), a Korean war vet with an unshakable moral code (Glenn Ford) and all the murder and duplicity one could ask for in a Fritz Lang movie. Like almost everything Lang ever did, HUMAN DESIRE boasts superbly symmetrical cinematography (the scenes of the railroad yard are some of the best of their kind ever committed to film), great sets, and an expert sense of staging (not to mention solid performances from all of the leads, an aspect often overlooked when people assess Lang's films). Storywise, HUMAN DESIRE lives up to its title- and with an outstanding and unusual ending that comes as a bit of a surprise.

Volatile drunk Carl Buckley gets fired from the train yard. He gets his flirtatious young wife Vicki to convince railroad executive John Owens to give his job back. Unbeknownst to Carl, the two have a history and she gives John sexual favor. Carl grows violently jealous and has Vicki lure John onto a train. Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) encounters and is distracted by Vicki as Carl murders John. This is a dark melodramatic noir of non-sympathetic characters with no rooting interest. Gloria Grahame is a great saucy, full-on femme-fatale. I want to like Glenn Ford more but I don't. It's a lurid tale and perfect good for its genre. Fritz Lang's directing is good but it could be more stylishly dark. Overall, it is more melodrama than to my liking.

War veteran Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) returns home and takes up his old position as a train engineer. One night Warren makes a pass at a friendly woman on a train, but she leaves him in a hurry, next day warren learns that a passenger wass murdered on the train he was travelling on. He is called as a witness at the inquiry. He tells the judge he saw nothing on the train and hides the fact from the judge that he unwittingly made advances on fellow passenger Vicki Buckley, the wife of his co worker Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford). Warren and Vicki soon hit it off, but soon Warren believes Vicky may have had something to do with the killing. Nice thriller with some great railroad footage, but you might be hard pressed to recognize it as a Lang film. Grahame is especially good in a particularly slutty role

Broderick Crawford and Gloria Grahme make an interesting couple as the two of them unravel in yet another boozy black and white (but mostly drab grey) plot of murder, betrayal, and blackmail, this time on a train as well as in a railroad yard, with Glenn Ford in the middle, coming back to his job as an engineer after fighting in the Korean War. It makes for a cozy and claustrophobic setting. While the lines that they say seem a bit unconvincing, their situations and personalities are what make this a memorable film. Crawford is especially impressive as a hulking railroad office employee with a vicious temper and jealousy for his younger wife. The plot has some inescapable holes in it, but the drama and tension build fairly well, first because of his tortuous marriage with Grahme which seems to go with the film's title, as the marriage is a sham that represents another unattainable desire for him. He carries the part off all the way to end.