Fritz Lang (1954)
The determination of Hollywood eventually triumphs over the determinism of Emile Zola in Fritz Lang’s reworking of La bête humaine. This is a relief for the viewer even if, in light of the Zola elements that Lang retains, it makes limited sense. The critic Dave Kehr complained that Human Desire was ‘marred only by [Glenn] Ford’s ability to register an appropriate sense of doom’ but any sense of doom on Ford’s part would be inappropriate. His character, unlike his Jean Gabin counterpart in Jean Renoir’s version of the Zola novel, is a leading man predestined not to come to a bad end. What mars the film isn’t Glenn Ford’s solid, convincing acting but Fritz Lang’s failure – or disinclination – to integrate Human Desire’s disparate elements.
The screenplay, by Alfred Hayes, updates the Zola story to the present day and relocates it in America. The Ford character, Jeff Warren, is returning to work as a train driver after military service in the Korean War. As he did before the War, Jeff boards with his work colleague Alec Simmons (Edgar Buchanan) and Alec’s family – his wife Vera (Diane DeLaire) and daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case). While Jeff has been in Korea, Ellen has changed from a cute teenager into an attractive young woman. (Kathleen Case was twenty-one at the time but looks considerably older.) It’s clear from the start that Ellen has eyes only for Jeff but he gets embroiled in a love affair with Vicki (Gloria Grahame), the much younger wife of hard-drinking railyard supervisor Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford), who is violently possessive of her. When he loses his supervisor job, Buckley urges Vicki to exploit her acquaintance with railroad executive John Owens (Grandon Rhodes) to get him reinstated: her mother used to be Owens’s housekeeper and Vicki grew up in his home. She reluctantly agrees to visit Owens but with disastrous results. She’s gone for several hours and Buckley guesses how far she had to go to accomplish the mission he gave her. He constructs a plan to murder Owens and forces Vicki to assist. He makes her write a letter to Owens, setting up a meeting on a train. After killing Owens in the latter’s private compartment, Buckley retains Vicki’s potentially incriminating letter, to dissuade her from going to the police.
Jeff is taking a complimentary ride back home on the same train. He witnesses Vicki leaving Owens’s compartment but, immediately smitten with her, denies having seen her before when he subsequently gives evidence to the inquest into Owens’s death. As their liaison develops, Jeff finds out more about Vicki’s unhappy past (Owens used her sexually when she was a teenager) and present (Buckley is a different kind of domestic abuser – a wife-beater). Vicki urges Jeff to kill Buckley, insisting that’s the only way they can be together. It’s in the closing stages that the storyline departs most decisively from that of Zola’s novel (and Renoir’s film). Jeff can’t bring himself to murder Buckley and decides that Vicki was, from the start, setting him up to get rid of her husband. Jeff ends the relationship with her but he does obtain from the drunken Buckley, and gives to Vicki, the letter she wrote to Owens. She is now free to escape and takes a train out of town but Buckley arrives in her compartment. In a paroxysm of jealous rage – he begs her not to leave him, accuses her of preparing to run off with Jeff – Buckley strangles Vicki to death. Up front in the driver’s seat, Jeff takes from his pocket a ticket to a dance which Ellen Simmons sold him a while previously, hoping that Jeff would invite her as his partner.
There are plenty of individually strong elements in Human Desire. The sequences of the train in motion, hurtling through tunnels and open country; the domestic scenes at the Simmons’s; the sense that Jeff, at the start, is both relieved and disappointed that his pre-Korea existence is resuming; his later realisation of the difference between killing a man in warfare and in civilian life. But the train’s speeding inexorably along the track ahead doesn’t make the sense it made in Renoir’s film since Jeff Warren ends up controlling his fate as well as the engine. Lang’s quasi-documentary observation of the railyards and their environs sits oddly with the noir visual conventions in evidence elsewhere. Human Desire was showing at BFI as part of the Gloria Grahame season programmed to coincide with the release of Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Good as she is in Crossfire, the first film that I saw in the season, her appearance in it is so brief that it came as a relief that Grahame’s role was bigger here. She’s excellent early on at conveying Vicki’s attraction to Jeff – and fear of him, as a witness to her exit from Owens’s train compartment. Her performance pays diminishing returns, largely because Vicki has to do so much half-truth telling and Grahame’s playing of this is repetitive. Broderick Crawford also starts well but overdoes Buckley’s alcoholic misery at the business end of the story. While Buckley is waiting impatiently for his wife to return from her appointment at Owens’s home, he talks with Vicki’s friend Jean (Peggy Maley), who is getting ready to go out. ‘You dames’, grumbles Buckley, ‘you spend more time gettin’ dressed …’ Jean replies with the most enjoyable line in the script: ‘Have to – it’s much better to have good looks than brains ‘cos most of the men I know can see much better than they can think’. The music by the splendidly named Daniele Amfitheatrof is conscientiously over-explanatory.
21 November 2017
