“A DIFFERENT KIND OF KILLING”
So… a novel by Émile Zola published in 1890 has been made into a movie no less than five times. La Bête humaine (“The Human Beast” or “The Beast Within”) is a gritty psychological crime thriller centered in the world of railway yards and train engineer life, and nearly every character, including the protagonist, Jacques Lantier, is someone with a dark soul. It was noir before that term was used to describe art.
A film adaptation was first made in Germany in 1920 by Ludwig Wolff. A more celebrated remake by Jean Renoir and starring the great Jean Gabin as Lantier was released in 1938. The Hollywood version, retitled Human Desire and reviewed here, was made in 1954 by Fritz Lang, the brilliant filmmaker who had fled Nazi Germany in the 30s and resumed what was already a stellar career in Tinsel Town. Two more pictures, a 1957 Argentinian version and a more well known British television reworking in 1995 entitled Cruel Train (directed by Malcolm McKay), also revisited the well-worn tale.
While Renoir’s 1938 rendition of La Bête humaine is generally considered the definitive depiction of Zola’s novel, Lang’s Human Desire is an excellent example of the kind of rough-and-ready films noir that Hollywood had been churning out through the 1940s and 50s. Lang himself had already made several that fit within the trend and style of these often cheap, always black and white, mostly cynical thrillers—Ministry of Fear (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and The Big Heat (1953), among others. The hallmarks of film noir are there—cinematography patterned after German expressionism, contrasting light and dark, shadows, nighttime, smoking, drinking, violence, and, most assuredly, a femme fatale.
This time the Lantier character, now called Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), is a much nicer fellow. The violence and rage that existed in earlier versions of the protagonist are not here. He’s a train engineer, recently discharged from the Korean War and back at his old job in the railway yards somewhere not unlike Pennsylvania. He’s rather sweet on the daughter of a colleague, a “good” girl and perhaps the only innocent and squeaky clean character in the story. Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) also works for the railroad, but he’s a mean drunk and is fired. He has a younger wife, Vicki (Gloria Grahame), who has a questionable past. Carl gets Vicki to visit a wealthy railway customer, Owens (Grandon Rhodes), to try and get him to influence the railway boss to rehire her husband. Carl doesn’t realize Vicki has some history with Owens. Carl gets his job back, but now he’s terribly jealous. He forces Vicki to help him murder Owens during a train ride. They don’t count on Jeff also being on the train and unwittingly becoming involved in the scheme. Jeff falls for Vicki and begins an affair with her, even though he knows she’s likely “no good.” And then Vicki has plans of her own for Jeff to do something about Carl. She believes that if Jeff had killed in the war, then he could do it again. But that, as he says, is “a different kind of killing.”
Yes, it’s quite a typical adultery-murder plot that floats around films noir. We can predict the events of the story before they occur, but we don’t care. Why? Because Fritz Lang’s direction is tight, interesting, full of striking imagery, and straddles the right balance between campy and heightened melodrama. The performances, especially by Grahame, are quite good. The only problem is an ending that might be considered unresolved.
Kino Lorber Studio Classics’ new Blu-ray release of Human Desire is top-notch with a gorgeous restoration that accents the cinematography by Burnett Guffey (who had won an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity and would win another for Bonnie and Clyde). The only supplements on the disk are a nine minute video discussion about the film by, curiously, actress Emily Mortimer, the theatrical trailer, and trailers for other Kino Lorber releases.
Human Desire is for fans of film noir, Fritz Lang, and the trio of stars—Ford, Grahame, and Crawford. Oh, and if you happen to like trains, there are a lot of those in the movie, too!
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