Gloria Grahame is one of the enduring figures of film noir because of her performances In a Lonely Place and The Big Heat. But she’s at least as good in her less well-known turn in Human Desire. Grahame plays Vicki, married to a brutish wife-beater (Broderick Crawford). Vicki is no saint – she accompanies hubby on a murder and helps him cover his tracks by coming on to a hunky railroad engineer (Glenn Ford). Vicki then suggests to her lover that if only her husband were dead…
Two of the most famous chacters of film noir – Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity and Cora Smith (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice – also entice their lovers into killing their husbands. These two iconic femmes fatale are duplicitous and murderously selfish.
But Vicki, while morally flexible, isn’t bad to the core. Hardscrabble circumstances drove her choice to marry her older husband. He is the one who drives her, against her will, to sleep with another man for a favor. He is the one who impulsively commits the murder she helps to cover up. He is the one who beats her.
No husband should put his wife in a situation where she has to actually say the words, “I don’t want to sleep with him again”. Vicki knows she shouldn’t have to utter that sentence, and she doesn’t.
From the perspective of the Glenn Ford character, a guy just back from WWII combat, Vicki is irresistible – and then very, very dangerous. The audience gets to see Vicki’s vulnerabilities and can reach a less binary, more textured assessment.
Perfect for the role of Vicki, Grahame projected an uncanny mixture of sexiness, vulnerability and unpredictability. The fact that Gloria was a Bad Girl in real life doesn’t hurt.
Human Desire was directed by the great Fritz Lang, and is a remake of Jean Renoir’s classic La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) with Jean Gabin and Simone Simon.
Lang was the genius behind Metropolis (1927), my choice as the greatest silent film ever, and the first great serial killer movie, M (1931). Also in real life, von Harbou warmed to the Nazis. A troubling meeting with Joseph Goebbels caused Lang to leave Germany for Hollywood, where he became one of the pioneering masters of American film noir, creating a classic body of work: Scarlet Street, House by the River, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.
In Human Desire, Lang gets the tension and suspense of the story just right, and adds lots of showy shots of the trains .
I have the Australian version of the Human Desire poster in my living room. The tag line is “She was born to be bad…to be kissed..to make trouble“, and the Aussie authorities have labeled it “NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN“.
Human Desire plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and and can sometimes be streamed on WATCH TCM.
