Human Desire

Fritz Lang’s follow-up to The Big Heat reunited stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in another dark, sordid noir tale — this one with a provenance atypical of the pulp-fiction noir world: the film is an adaptation and update of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La bête humaine (Jean Renoir directed a version in 1938). Ford is Korean War vet and train engineer Jeff Warren, whose life goes off the rails when he is drawn into the seductive web of femme fatale Vicki (Grahame). Vicki’s hot tempered, murderously jealous lout of a husband is Carl (Broderick Crawford), Jeff’s co-worker. The film’s terrific expressionist cinematography is by Burnett Guffey, who also shot Nick Ray’s In a Lonely Place (and won an Oscar for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde). “A gripping melodrama . . . Lang mines the railway setting for a remarkable rich series of visual correlatives to his oppressive Catholic sense of guilt and retribution” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader). “Like all Lang’s best ’50s work, as cold, hard and steely grey as the railway tracks which here mark out the action . . . Grahame and Crawford are both superb” (Sheila Johnston, Time Out). B&W, 35mm. 91 mins.