It Feels So Natural, and Yet...
This weekend's review: Human Desire.
There were two things that made me curious about Human Desire; it was based on a story by Emile Zola (not your typical Hollywood fare) and, more importantly, it was directed by Fritz Lang. I always want to see Lang’s work, of course, but I was curious to see what he’d do with such unusual source material. The result…it continues to support my “Lang only worked on projects he found interesting or could make interesting” theory, but is personally in the lower middle of Lang’s work for me.
In practice, there are two main characters in this story. One is Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), a railroad engineer just home from the Korean War and settling back into his old job. The other is Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame), the beautiful wife of station foreman Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford). After spending some time following Jeff as he gets back to old routines, we shift focus to Carl and Vicki. Carl just lost his job due to his temper, and he asks Vicki, who’s old friends with wealthy businessman John Owens (Grandon Rhodes) to plead with Owens on his behalf. She does so and gets Carl his job back, but Carl suddenly realizes exactly how Vicki convinced Owens to do so, and flies into a rage. Forcing Vicki to write Owens a note promising to meet him on a train, the two of them go to Owens’ cabin, where Carl promptly murders him. This is where everything ties together, as Jeff is on the same train getting a free ride back to town, and Vicki has to get him out of the way so he won’t see Carl leaving Owens’ cabin or train car. Afterwards, Carl keeps the note Vicki wrote as blackmail so she won’t leave him, Jeff puts a lot of pieces together after an inquest once Owens’ body is found, and Vicki turns to Jeff for help and comfort. You’ve got all the pieces for a classic noir tale here…but the execution isn’t quite what you’d expect.
What jumped out at me as the story went along is that it plays with the major noir tropes. Vicki is set up as the typical femme fatale, introduced as the young, pretty wife of a slightly older man, looking for all the world like a woman who lazes around the house and covets the finer things in life, which her man can’t provide. But then this quickly gets turned on its head as we see her reluctant to use her wiles on Owens, and increasingly upset as things play out. By the time the blackmail rolls around, you have a fair bit of sympathy for her, and you can understand why she would turn to someone like Jeff (though there’s some ambiguity as to whether she’s exaggerating things to make him more inclined to support her). In a way, she becomes the femme fatale over the course of the movie, driven to it by increasingly desperate circumstances. It’s “good woman gets corrupted by bad man” instead of the other way around, and that’s somewhat refreshing.
Similarly, Jeff isn’t the typical “innocent caught up in a bad situation” focal character. Other than the fact that he’s carrying on with another man’s wife (admittedly not an easy thing to overlook), he pretty much remains a good man throughout. This does lead to a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” scenario, but again, it’s a different take on the genre, and leads to an ending that’s interesting in multiple ways, complete with a great moment of tension and a satisfying catharsis. I can’t tell you how much of this was from Zola, how much was from the script, or how much Lang brought to the table, but it fits into my theory of Lang’s films perfectly.
All of this being said, I do have some problems with the movie. Chief among them is an overreliance on ambiguity. Like I said above, it’s hard to tell if the horror stories Vicki tells Jeff about Carl are recent developments, made up entirely (though this is doubtful), or were supposed to be present from the beginning. I appreciate the intent, but in practice, it muddies the waters and makes the scenes lose some of their impact. Furthermore, a lot of things happen, especially near the end, that are just left hanging. Since this is a movie made under the Hays Code, we can guess how it’s all going to play out, but it doesn’t quite end the way we expect it to, and that can be a little jarring. There was also a setup early on involving the past relationship between Owens and Vicki that I thought was leading in an entirely different direction, but went the more traditional route instead. I’m less inclined to complain about that one, though; while the plot still could have played out much the same way, it’s a little too melodramatic, even by 50’s Hollywood standards. And it may be a line of thinking that’s more likely to occur to modern viewers than viewers in the 1950’s, besides.
I’m on the fence about recommending this one. There’s nothing actively wrong with it, and I like the changes to the formula, but some of it is so different, without the proper context to make it fully click, that it might put some people off. However, if you’re a noir or a Lang fan, I would suggest giving it a look. As for everyone else…decide if you’re in the mood for it.
There were two things that made me curious about Human Desire; it was based on a story by Emile Zola (not your typical Hollywood fare) and, more importantly, it was directed by Fritz Lang. I always want to see Lang’s work, of course, but I was curious to see what he’d do with such unusual source material. The result…it continues to support my “Lang only worked on projects he found interesting or could make interesting” theory, but is personally in the lower middle of Lang’s work for me.
In practice, there are two main characters in this story. One is Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), a railroad engineer just home from the Korean War and settling back into his old job. The other is Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame), the beautiful wife of station foreman Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford). After spending some time following Jeff as he gets back to old routines, we shift focus to Carl and Vicki. Carl just lost his job due to his temper, and he asks Vicki, who’s old friends with wealthy businessman John Owens (Grandon Rhodes) to plead with Owens on his behalf. She does so and gets Carl his job back, but Carl suddenly realizes exactly how Vicki convinced Owens to do so, and flies into a rage. Forcing Vicki to write Owens a note promising to meet him on a train, the two of them go to Owens’ cabin, where Carl promptly murders him. This is where everything ties together, as Jeff is on the same train getting a free ride back to town, and Vicki has to get him out of the way so he won’t see Carl leaving Owens’ cabin or train car. Afterwards, Carl keeps the note Vicki wrote as blackmail so she won’t leave him, Jeff puts a lot of pieces together after an inquest once Owens’ body is found, and Vicki turns to Jeff for help and comfort. You’ve got all the pieces for a classic noir tale here…but the execution isn’t quite what you’d expect.
What jumped out at me as the story went along is that it plays with the major noir tropes. Vicki is set up as the typical femme fatale, introduced as the young, pretty wife of a slightly older man, looking for all the world like a woman who lazes around the house and covets the finer things in life, which her man can’t provide. But then this quickly gets turned on its head as we see her reluctant to use her wiles on Owens, and increasingly upset as things play out. By the time the blackmail rolls around, you have a fair bit of sympathy for her, and you can understand why she would turn to someone like Jeff (though there’s some ambiguity as to whether she’s exaggerating things to make him more inclined to support her). In a way, she becomes the femme fatale over the course of the movie, driven to it by increasingly desperate circumstances. It’s “good woman gets corrupted by bad man” instead of the other way around, and that’s somewhat refreshing.
Similarly, Jeff isn’t the typical “innocent caught up in a bad situation” focal character. Other than the fact that he’s carrying on with another man’s wife (admittedly not an easy thing to overlook), he pretty much remains a good man throughout. This does lead to a “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” scenario, but again, it’s a different take on the genre, and leads to an ending that’s interesting in multiple ways, complete with a great moment of tension and a satisfying catharsis. I can’t tell you how much of this was from Zola, how much was from the script, or how much Lang brought to the table, but it fits into my theory of Lang’s films perfectly.
All of this being said, I do have some problems with the movie. Chief among them is an overreliance on ambiguity. Like I said above, it’s hard to tell if the horror stories Vicki tells Jeff about Carl are recent developments, made up entirely (though this is doubtful), or were supposed to be present from the beginning. I appreciate the intent, but in practice, it muddies the waters and makes the scenes lose some of their impact. Furthermore, a lot of things happen, especially near the end, that are just left hanging. Since this is a movie made under the Hays Code, we can guess how it’s all going to play out, but it doesn’t quite end the way we expect it to, and that can be a little jarring. There was also a setup early on involving the past relationship between Owens and Vicki that I thought was leading in an entirely different direction, but went the more traditional route instead. I’m less inclined to complain about that one, though; while the plot still could have played out much the same way, it’s a little too melodramatic, even by 50’s Hollywood standards. And it may be a line of thinking that’s more likely to occur to modern viewers than viewers in the 1950’s, besides.
I’m on the fence about recommending this one. There’s nothing actively wrong with it, and I like the changes to the formula, but some of it is so different, without the proper context to make it fully click, that it might put some people off. However, if you’re a noir or a Lang fan, I would suggest giving it a look. As for everyone else…decide if you’re in the mood for it.