Fritz Lang’s hugely under-appreciated movie from the latter half of his career, Human Desire, seems in general not to rank highly with film scholars and has never been considered one of the Austrian-German-American filmmaker’s finest works. It was released to an indifferent box office response by Harry Cohn’s Columbia Pictures in 1954, and clearly wasn’t the follow-up to The Big Heat (made for the same studio the previous year) that had been anticipated there, despite sharing two of the stars of that film as its leads, namely Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame.
The film was a faithful remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Bête humaine, based loosely on Émile Zola's novel of 1890, which had been in production at Columbia before Lang had even joined the studio and was assigned him later by producer Jerry Wald.
Although departing significantly from the novel on which it was ostensibly based, Renoir’s film (which starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon) had lived up to its title thanks to its frank depiction of a destructive love triangle participated in by three characters, each of whom is shown to be a deeply ethically flawed (and homicidal) individual. Lang’s remake follows exactly the same narrative template as that which Renoir developed from Zola’s state-of-the-nation metaphor but replaces the psychotically unhinged character played by Gabin with wholesome box office star Glenn Ford. In doing so it apparently compounded the perception of the movie as nothing more than a watered-down version of its predecessor. Lang seemingly endorsed this pejorative view when, in an interview addressing the fact that his film actually became more popular in France than the Renoir version, he said: “the French consider this [film] formally very beautiful. That’s nice, but it’s not La Bête humaine".
The success of The Big Heat brought with it enough clout for Lang at Columbia for him to be able to propose at least some changes to the production: he managed to get the pre-existing Maxwell Shane screenplay rewritten, with his preferred choice of writer Alfred Hayes brought on board for the job. This was someone who had worked with Lang previously on 1952’s Clash by Night and had been involved unofficially in scripting the Neo-Realist works of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti in Italy after the war. Initially still beholden to the logic of Renoir’s original film, Lang had also proposed casting his old friend Peter Lorre in the ‘anti-hero’ role formerly inhabited by Jean Gabin, but his efforts on that front fell through. Lang and Hayes were further stymied by Wald’s insistence that the title ‘The Human Beast’ should refer only to the female character at the centre of the narrative’s love triangle (here played by Gloria Grahame rather than Lang’s first choice, Rita Hayworth) who should, therefore, be written as a devious femme fatale character with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The whole point of Renoir’s film, of course, was that humanity as a whole should be revealed by it to be inherently corrupt and sick, not just the women!
However, despite their having to work within these ludicrously restrictive parameters, it is possible to see that Lang and Hayes did, in fact, manage to subvert them enough to produce a film that is, in its own quietly penetrating way, just as ruthlessly cynical and cutting in its assessment of the inadequacies of human nature as anything in Renoir’s film, if not even more so. For some reason this has largely been overlooked down the years, and the standard conclusion – that Human Desire is a shallow Hollywood re-tread of the Renoir 1938 original – has become the unchallenged one, with even Lang’s biographer Patrick McGilligan dismissing the movie as a minor one in Lang’s oeuvre and condemning its characters as ‘ill-drawn’. In fact, the film manages, very subtly and quite cleverly, to make a virtue of the restrictions cumbersomely placed upon it by unfeeling producers and unpromising casting decisions. Instead of Peter Lorre, Lang found himself saddled with the distinctly wholesome (and therefore unsuitable) Glenn Ford as the male lead: a popular actor who was best known for playing ordinary guys usually situated as sympathetic audience identification figures. The role of Jeff Warren was originally conceived in Renoir’s film as a man who suffers from a congenital urge to murder women when he gets too close to them, only the mechanical routine of his day job as a locomotive engine driver helping him control these base urges. It’s hard to imagine Ford in that kind of role, so Hayes and Lang were compelled to reconfigure his version of the character to be less dangerous and less alienating than he’d been in Renoir’s film, thus changing the essential nature of the story. Here, Warren has just returned from the army after three years in the Korean War, and can’t wait to take up his old secure job on the railroads again. He’s lodging with his engine mate’s family and seems on the verge of kindling a tentative relationship with his colleague’s daughter Ellen (Kathleen Chase), who has blossomed into a young woman in the years he has been away. Warren apparently yearns only for the simple pleasures of an uncomplicated small-town life, underpinned by routine and the support of a ‘good’ woman.
The narrative engine driving this film noir is the examination of how such a straight-down-the-line everyman such as Warren becomes involved in covering up a murder plot for the wife of the assistant yard manager at his railroad branch after her unhinged alcoholic husband kills a rival and implicates her in the act. The script is apparently structured like the kind of tale Jerry Wald had been demanding of Lang all along: a good, wholesome, morally upright man is led astray by a duplicitous woman, a femme fatale who attempts to manipulate him into committing a second murder to get herself out of a blackmail fix. In fact, if we examine how the film un-spools the details of its traditional noir plot and the moral dilemmas that underpin the story, we quickly realise that Warren is only nominally the central character in the film at all. He’s actually too dull and self-regarding to spend that much time on; only his sense of entitlement and privilege will prove to be crucial elements in the play of events that subsequently unfold. The real emotional centre of the film lies with its main female character Vickie Buckley, as played by Gloria Grahame in what just might be her finest performance. It’s certainly one of the meatiest female roles in the noir canon, and notable for the fact that Lang does explicitly make her viewpoint the central focus of the movie for large portions of the run-time, apparently in sympathy with her position – because that’s where most of the tension in the tale actually resides.
At the end, of course, we’re encouraged (again, at least on the surface) to abruptly switch our sympathies back Warren’s way: he accuses Vickie of conniving to get him to fall in love with her simply so that she can more easily manipulate him into killing her no-good husband, only revealing the full details of her situation when he has already become too involved to escape the accusation that he’s been an accomplice in covering up her knowledge of the first murder. Realising the nature of her deception, the spell of erotic infatuation is decisively broken and, in the final moments of the film, Warren ditches Vickie and goes back to his carefree, orderly, regulated life, represented by the straightness of the railroad tracks and the barren, uncomplicated openness of the landscape his engine traverses on a daily basis as he daydreams about inviting his sweetheart Ellen to the Railroad Employees’ Association ‘Annual Dance and Frolic’.
A traditional happy ending, then? Has order been restored and the potential for chaos that occurs when one unwisely succumbs to erotic lust in the 1950s been put firmly back in its box and overcome once and for all? Actually no: the end of Human Desire contains one of the most disturbing conclusions to any film that you will ever encounter from any period. For it leaves us with its lead female character -- spoiler! -- brutally strangled to death (a favourite Fritz Lang scenario) with no consequences for the perpetrator and, even more shockingly, no sense that the hypocritical male lead – the person we’re all meant to be rooting for – knows or would actually even care very deeply even if he did, having freed himself from a tangled moral web of vice, blackmail and abuse in order to skip merrily back to his mainstream life where ignorance is, quite literally, bliss.
Vickie Buckley is a compelling, tragic figure who has lived a life beset by abuse and the constant need to work around the unpredictable vicissitudes of male privilege. She’s introduced to us as her temperamental husband, Carl, returns home, having just been fired from his job as assistant railyard manager after getting into an argument with his superior over an unloaded shipment. Carl, played by actor Broderick Crawford, who in real life was also known for his problems with alcohol, is considerably older than his wife, and she is at first positioned for us – reclining on the bed in the couple’s cramped house on the edge of the noisy railyard – as a louche gold-digger, twisting a hapless old fool around her little finger for her own advancement. However, the entire force of the narrative lies in its various quiet attempts to undermine this clichéd assumption. Carl, we soon come to realise, is a monster: ruled by violent fits of temper, his drunkenness and overpowering jealousy. He pleads and cajoles Vickie into meeting up with one of the railroad’s major business clients because he knows that this man, John Owens (Grandon Rhodes), once had a thing for her and that his clout with the railroad company might allow her to persuade Owens to get him his job back. We can see not only that Vickie is reluctant to go along with the idea (presumably being quite aware of her husband’s jealous tendencies), but that she is frozen with hostility at the very thought of what the plan will entail; only very late into the film do we discover that Vickie’s mother had once worked for Owens as a housekeeper when Vickie was sixteen, and that at around this time he must have forced himself upon her. Carl is perfectly willing to use this ‘relationship’ for his own ends, but when the plan actually works and Vickie does what she has to do to help her husband get back his job, he instantly becomes violently enraged by the thought of her with another man and viciously assaults her.
Gloria Grahame’s performance in this scene is one of the elements that enable the film to suggest depths of character that go beyond the mere written word of the script. Her reaction to Carl’s violence is clearly that of someone who has been violently beaten, subjugated and hurt many times; a brittle, jagged fear is contained in her involuntary cries and in the way in which she cowers and shrinks from the anticipation of her lumbering husband’s cruel blows. When, at the end of the film, she appears to be revelling in the confirmation of her husband’s worst suspicions, not only admitting her adultery with Owens but emphasising how she also unsuccessfully tried to get him to have a relationship with her so that she could leave Carl, this taunting seems a deliberate act of suicide by someone who is fully aware of her husband’s murderous temper, knows what his reaction is likely to be, yet is on a downward spiral having just been rejected by Warren. It is also a completely rational attempt by someone trapped in a dangerous situation in a small town with a violent, unpredictable bully, to get herself out of dodge by the only means available to her. All of Vickie’s actions, far from being the schemes of an emotionless manipulator, seem more like the desperate actions of an abuse survivor who is trapped in the tightening grip of a nightmarish vice propelling her towards increasingly life-threatening predicaments: first of all she is forced to meet with another much older man for her husband’s selfish benefit, and then take part in his murder – for which she is blackmailed as a means of allowing her husband to continue to exert his violent control over her.
Given her precarious position, it would almost be understandable if Vickie had been attempting to manipulate Warren in precisely the manner she is later accused of by him when he learns the truth about everything. The two meet for the first time after Owens is murdered by Carl in the carriage of the train on which Warren is also a passenger, travelling home after completing relief work for a colleague. Carl sends Vickie out to distract Warren in the corridor by flirting with him and tempting him into the club car so that Carl might slip out of the murder carriage unseen. In fact, Vickie doesn’t really have to do much flirting since Warren is all over her from the minute he first claps eyes on her. All she is guilty of is not mentioning she’s married and that her husband is hiding in one of the adjoining carriages having just cold-bloodedly murdered a man. Of course, given her husband’s cold, naked brutality and deranged self-justification for his actions, who could really blame her for not mentioning that? Warren, who is clearly smitten despite almost immediately learning Vickie’s true identity, still covers for her later at the inquest where it is established that Owen was murdered. No one asks him to do this. Indeed, Vickie clearly looks like she’s half expecting Warren to come clean. The fact that he doesn’t is entirely on him, and immediately buts Vickie in a similarly potentially compromised position with regard to Warren as the one she is already in with her husband -- who is using the threat of releasing a letter he forced Vickie to write to Owens to set up their meeting, in order to implicate her in the crime. Warren thereafter knowingly enters into an affair with a married woman while her husband goes out and gets drunk every night, eventually losing for the second time the job Vickie had only just succeeded in getting back for him. He encourages her to leave Carl after she shows him the deep bruises and finger marks on her neck and shoulders – further proof of the life of abuse she has been silently enduring – but, of course, she can’t: not so long as her husband still has the incriminating letter in his possession. After many clandestine meetings at Carl’s tiny cluttered house (dominated by the oppressive clatter of passing trains which Vickie claims she now finds preferable to the quiet when she’s alone) or at night -- in abandoned work sheds at the railyard where Carl is no longer welcome -- Vickie comes clean about her forced involvement in the murder perpetrated by her husband, and suggests that the only way out for them both is for Warren to kill Carl.
Warren actually gets as far as stalking Carl through the deserted railyard at night and across the tracks of the railway line with a spanner in his hand, but this suggestion of murder, in reality, marks the moment at which the film appears to not only revoke its sympathies for Vickie but to recast her in more sinister terms than up to now we had been inclined to think of her. She has made the mistake of assuming that Warren’s experiences in the war would have made him more amenable to such a drastic proposal and tries to impugn his masculinity when he recoils in disgust at the idea of murder. Given her past history and experiences with men thus far, it seems understandable how she might've come to such a misconceived conclusion. Shouldn't her attitude be seen as more an indicator of psychological damage than outright calculating perfidy? If you go back and watch the film with this in mind, there’s next to no evidence of the calculating femme fatale the screenplay now reimagines her as for the benefit of the angry expository monologue Warren delivers before ditching her for good. In fact, far from deliberately drawing him into her net and only then revealing the full situation when she’s quite sure Warren will be implicated, it is he who first pursues her in order to start the affair. Then, sensing she is holding things back from him, he demands to be told the whole truth. Only after this demand does she eventually cave in and tell him what he apparently wants to know, at which point he promptly blames her for the situation that knowing this truth now places him in, and accuses her of planning the entire scenario! It is exactly the same inconstancy and self-absorbed accusatory male pride as Carl exhibited to start this whole saga off in the first place, and it means that, once again, Vickie finds herself abandoned to her fate, this time by someone it appears she almost certainly really did love, despite her stupid miscalculation. The cynical cleverness at work in Fritz Lang’s film lies in its apparent endorsement of the male hero’s hypocritical self-regard, at least on the surface, while forcing us to confront the results of his indifference and complacency: the film ends (spoiler again!) with that hideous strangulation scene – Carl slowly squeezing the life out of Vickie in the carriage of a train that’s being driven all the while by the now happily oblivious Jeff Warren, whom we cut to immediately afterwards dreamily thinking of inviting Ellen to the works dance, the film ending at this point as though his finally freeing himself of the ‘fallen woman’ who led him so astray (and who now lies lifeless a mere few meters away) somehow constitutes the uplifting happy ending Daniele Amfitheatrof’s rousing score seems to indicate as it swells on the soundtrack!
It’s quite possible that in attempting to mould the screenplay to fit the requirements of its producers and to accommodate the personas of its lead male performers Lang and Hayes were entirely oblivious to the way in which the film they finished up making could also be read as an indictment of the smug complacency of small-town life and of male privilege in general, portraying it as an actively dangerous threat to women who don’t fit the approved template for feminine behaviour or who fail in their efforts to conform to that template; it’s possible that they really did just see their characters as flawed, watered down versions of those originally created for the Renoir film. And it might be that Gloria Grahame brings more to the role of Vickie Buckley than was actually on the written page, and so injects a whole extra level of meaning into the film that has just been hidden within it all these years, lying dormant and waiting to be discovered when the times were more amenable to the disturbing message that that meaning now suggests. Taking the film noir out of the streets of the big city and into the quiet backwaters of a semi-industrialised small town only throws a spotlight more intently on its characters and emphasises the ethical quagmire they inhabit. Burnett Guffey’s cinematography turns the rather bleak and dusty barren documentary landscape of loading bays and engineering sheds we see by day into a shadowy sink-well of sin by night – a realist cataloguing of everyday mundanity that provides a dark venue for its lost inhabitants to lose themselves either in drink or in sex when the light drains away from the picture at the end of the working day. Robert Peterson and William Kiernan’s art direction and set decoration fully service the contradictory Langian tendency to suggest secrecy and criminality simply by looking still more intently than usual at the mundane trivialities of domestic life: the consumerist clutter of bird cages and ornaments and showroom furniture that fills up the Buckley home, but provides only a kitsch simulacrum of the suburban stability and normality that is otherwise completely absent from their broken relationship. Today, Human Desire feels more apposite than ever. Lang’s fatalistic nihilism captures something bleak and eternal about inequality between the sexes, that's built into the grain and running through the texture, here, of everyday lived experience.
Eureka Entertainment and Masters of Cinema present Human Desire in the UK for the first time on Blu-ray. The HD transfer is solid and the dual-disc presentation also features detailed background on the feature in a lengthy video presentation by film historian Tony Rayns. The package also includes a 40-page booklet with new writing on the film by Travis Crawford, critic and author Richard Combs, and writer Adam Batty, alongside rare archival imagery.
