Human Desire

This film was directed by Fritz Lang. It re-unites the cool as ice award winning stars of Lang's The Big Heat, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. Unlike The Big Heat, which features an almost straightforward cast of good guys and bad guys, Human Desire is a more self-consciously noir film, perhaps even one with an understated proto-feminist stance.

Once again, Grahame plays a woman for whom the John Lee Hooker lyric "She wiggles when she walks! She wiggle!" was likely invented but her character here is less self-assured and to my mind much more sympathetic than many of her other performances. Grahame is more than the bad girl with a sharp tongue and taste for furs that she was in The Big Heat.

If this movie were remade today it would almost certainly have a different ending and likely "corrected" sex stereotypes that would be just as cartoonish as some of the sex stereotypes of the 50s were. So it goes. This film's issues resonate today. The protagonist Jeff Warren (Ford) has just returned from the Korean War and is looking forward to a relatively slow paced easy life as a train engineer. One of his co-workers, the quick tempered, older and portly Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) has mouthed off to the boss and been fired for his troubles. Even humbling himself and begging for his job back didn't help. Buckley is too old to switch careers at this point in his life. But Buckley has another plan. His beautiful much younger supportive wife Vicki (Grahame) grew up in the home of an important railroad customer, John Owens (Brandon Rhodes). If Vicki will speak to Owens on her husband's behalf it's a cinch that Owens' influence can make the railroad boss rehire Buckley.

There's a problem however. Vicki doesn't want to speak to Owens. From the way Vicki stiffens when she hears Owens' name to her initial refusal to talk to Owens, it's painfully obvious to a modern audience (and likely would have been to the 50s audience as well) why the otherwise supportive and vivacious Vicki is reluctant to help. Carl's ugly persistence leads to unforeseen consequences that drag in Warren and change everyone's lives.

There's a lot to unpack in this movie. It combines wonderful use of light and shadow with typical snappy dialogue. I think it was one of Grahame's better films.