Human Desire

Jeff is an engine driver back from the Korean war; he works on the railway and wants a quiet life. Carl, who works on the same line, loses his job and expects his wife Vicki to help; she knows the man in charge. She goes and the job is restored. Carl works out what happened and turns violent. A murder is committed on a train and Jeff is in that carriage. He does not say what he saw. Then Vicki comes to him. Fritz Lang directs. Glenn Ford plays Jeff, Gloria Grahame plays Vicki and Broderick Crawford plays Carl. The source is Émile Zola's novel. The same novel had been filmed in France years earlier; Lang's version was altered to the American censorship code and the novel's ideas of inheritance and compulsion were largely removed. Its strongest side is the setting: the railway, the yards, the couplings and the night rails carry the whole narrative, and the opening is wordless. Gloria Grahame's character is close to the noir type of woman, and the film does not build her as a trap; she has her own calculation and the narrative shows it. Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame had appeared together in an earlier Lang film. Its limit is the censorship; set beside the novel the reasons for the characters' behaviour stay weak. Who it is for: viewers who like noir and Fritz Lang's American period. Who it is not for: the plot is constrained, the ending is built to the rules of its time, and the characters are not opened enough.