Human Desire (1954)

Human Desire is an American romantic film drama first released in 1954, directed by Fritz Lang.  The film is based on a novel by Émile Zola and stars Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan and Kathleen Case.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


When railway worker Carl Buckley is fired by his foreman, he compels his seductive wife Vicki to ask Mr Owens, a senior railway official, to have him reinstated.  When Vicki manages to get him his job back, Buckley is immediately suspicious that she may have allowed Owens to seduce her,  Consumed with jealousy, Buckley stabs Owens to death during a train journey and uses a letter from his wife to the dead man to ensure she does not testify against him.  On the night of the killing, Korean war veteran Jeff Warren sees Vicki leaving the compartment in which the murder takes place.  Jeff finds himself irresistibly drawn towards Vicki and does not mention what he has seen at the inquest into the killing.  Later, once they have embarked on a passionate love affair, Vicki reveals the danger she is in and persuades Jeff that he must kill her husband...

Fritz Lang’s adaptation of Émile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine is a competent example of late American film noir but lacks the intensity and inspired touch that we see in many of the director’s earlier works.  Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame had both excelled in Lang’s previous noir thriller, The Big Heat (1953), but here the pairing doesn’t work quite so well, although this can be partly attributed to an inferior screenplay.

Burnett Guffey’s slick cinematography is far more successful at conveying the dark undercurrents and dangerous passions than the scripted dialogue, although this is clearly not enough to make this a great film.   Lang and his performers show far too much restraint and should have gone much further in showing the torrid and sordid nature of the deadly desires which ensnare the protagonists.   Jean Renoir’s 1938 version, La Bête humaine, is much more faithful to Zola’s novel and is far more successful at capturing the tragic essence of the story, through its gradually mounting tension which culminates in a far bleaker ending.

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