Classic Cinema Obsession: HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954)

By Jennifer Baldwin. This is about Film Noir, so here’s a flashback …

I went through a bit of a Glenn Ford/Gloria Grahame/THE BIG HEAT phase several years ago. I became obsessed with the movie and those two actors. I was like a junky, watching the movie over and over, memorizing lines, musing over the themes, showing the famous boiling coffee scene to anyone who would watch.

But eventually, no matter how much I loved THE BIG HEAT, it couldn’t withstand the over-obsession. I needed a new drug. I needed something else to give me that Glenn and Gloria fix.

Then I read about HUMAN DESIRE. It was made after THE BIG HEAT, starring Ford and Grahame, another scalding-hot 1950s noir directed by Fritz Lang. As soon as I found out about it, I had to have it. Only problem: it wasn’t on DVD. You couldn’t buy it in the store. It was as good as gone for someone like me out in the Michigan suburbs, with not a repertoire theater in sight.

I went into the shadows. I spent many a midnight hour searching the internet for a copy of the movie. I was bleary-eyed and half crazed with want. And then I found it. One of those online trading post/auction sites. Eight bucks plus shipping and handling and HUMAN DESIRE could be mine. It was someone’s homemade DVD copy, complete with fuzzy picture and bad sound, but buying it made me feel like I was the protagonist in my own film noir, swapping cash with some anonymous stranger on the black market for a “treasure” that was worn out and almost worthless.

But it was worth everything to me. I watched HUMAN DESIRE and loved it more than I had loved THE BIG HEAT. I don’t know if I loved it so much because it took all that effort to finally get a copy, or if I genuinely loved the movie more, but HUMAN DESIRE became one of my secret movie treasures.

Now it’s out on DVD, an official release from Columbia Pictures, with pristine picture and remastered sound, and I still think that it’s tops. I think it’s Gloria Grahame’s masterpiece. I think it’s misunderstood. I think Glenn Ford’s character is the real villain and that far from having a “happy” ending, it has one of the bleakest, most cynical endings in all of noir.

The misinterpretation of the film stems from the assumption that Grahame’s character is a traditional “femme fatale” evil woman type. She’s Gloria Grahame, after all, and she wants Glenn Ford to commit murder for her. But I couldn’t just slot her into the femme fatale role that easily. She might have murder in her heart, but it didn’t come there lightly.

She’s selfish, yes, but she’s also the victim of a murderously jealous brute, a guy who beats her and pimps her out, and then regrets it later, making her an accomplice to his murder. And then when she thinks she’s found her savior in Glenn Ford’s Jeff – a guy she thought she had her hooks in – he up and dumps her, opting for a dose of suburban safety with the wholesome daughter of a friend. He (passively) lets the engine drive him to his perfect wife, while poor Gloria gets strangled back there in her train compartment. Ford’s character has options; Gloria’s character has none.

On the surface, she’s a liar, but Grahame hints at truth, at a real human feeling beneath the “sultry temptress.” She’s vulnerable, she’s not really in control of things, just half-blindly striking out at whatever she thinks might save her. She’s got regrets, and they mean something, as she struggles to reconcile survival with guilt (and some warped kind of love).

HUMAN DESIRE is Grahame’s tour de force. Others point to THE BIG HEAT or her work with Bogie in Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE. I won’t dispute that her performances are phenomenal in both of those heavyweights, but in HUMAN DESIRE she packs on conflicting layers of self-loathing, manipulation, naked sexuality, kittenish hurt, lust, vulnerability, wickedness, selfishness, and finally broken-down weariness, and then she masks it all in an opaque ambiguity so that I can’t help seeing something different in her performance every time.

Watch her first scene with her husband, Carl (Broderick Crawford). Our first glimpse of Vicky is powerfully sexual, with her leg up in the air in a curious position.

Then she rounds her lips and sucks down an ice cube.

Ok, yeah, we know what’s on her mind. When Carl comes in, she’s loosey-goosey with her skirt, drapes herself on him, reacts intimately to him: the good, caring wife.

That is, until he suggests she go see her former employer and persuade the old boss to help Carl get his job back.

Then all the kissing and flirting stops. Vicky’s trying to be a good wife (whether she really feels it or not), but the moment her husband offers her up as bait to a former employer (and, it is hinted, former lover), she turns cold. Her playacting can’t disguise the fact that she’s married to a dull-witted jerk who wants to prostitute her so he can get his job back. Lang puts her opposite the bird cage, a woman trapped.

In this scene alone, she’s introduced as the sultry sex kitten, then the loving wife, and then finally the broken woman trapped in a dysfunctional marriage.

Later, she works on Jeff (Glenn Ford) with her story about Carl’s abusiveness. She’s obviously manipulating him, but her story isn’t untrue, thus the tension between her femme fatale persona and her genuine need to escape a bad relationship.

Notice the way Lang contrasts the “good girl” and the “bad girl” in Jeff’s life: The good girl (Kathleen Case) covering her skin, while the bad girl (Grahame) is taking hers off, baring her (bruised) skin.

It’s the contrast between domesticity gone right and domesticity gone horribly wrong. This is why I think Glenn Ford’s character is the villain of the movie and not the hero. Lang turns him into a near-caricature of the “nice guy” hero, laughing it up with his perfectly ordinary suburban friends, trading gentle flirtations with their virtuous nice girl daughter.

It’s so sweet and “perfect” that it almost has to be parody. The real protagonist of the film is Grahame’s Vicky, a woman who feels trapped in her horrible life and who gives herself over to a forbidden desire because she can see no other way out.

Everything about this scenario indicates we should be rooting for Jeff, the regular guy who is getting tricked by the wicked, lying temptress. But the way the film actually plays out — and the way the two lead actors play their characters — suggests the opposite: We’re not rooting for Jeff to get away, but for Jeff to kill Carl and rescue Vicky from her cage.

Notice the way Lang uses the train imagery.

The tracks are confining, the boxcars close in on everything, restricting movement, choice, and freedom. But who is driving the train? Who controls the engine?

It is Jeff, the engineer. He’s content to let the train take him wherever the tracks lead. When Vicky tries to escape Carl for good, it is Jeff’s indifference, his willingness to just let the train take him to the “perfect” life that’s been laid out for him, that dooms Vicky to death. She tries to break free, while Jeff gives in to the orderliness of the trains. Jeff survives, without a thought to what fate he’s left Vicky to suffer.

That final smile on Glenn Ford’s lips doesn’t look like the smile of a contented, free man.

It strikes me as the smile of a man who is self-satisfied with making the “right” choice and who thinks on his affair with Vicky as nothing more than a close call. He’s like the gentleman who goes slumming for a night with the poor girl, but who eventually goes home to his “proper” sweetheart in the morning. Meanwhile, the poor girl he is “escaping” from is herself a few cars back having her life snuffed out in a most brutal way. “When I first came here, I thought I’d never get used to the trains,” Vicky tells Jeff at one point. “Now when it’s quiet, I get nervous,” she finishes, ominously.

Ford doesn’t get enough credit for his performance either. Throughout the film he alternates between a quiet but self-righteous indignation at Vicky’s amorality and a leering sort of hunger because he wants to sleep with her.

Instead of a happy ending for our “hero,” I’m left feeling sick to my stomach that the deliciously off-kilter, sad, vulnerable Vicky was left to die. Don’t dare to break free, Vicky. Stay in that cage and take your licks like a good girl. Meanwhile, Jeff rides off into an ordered existence and boring domestic sunset.

I think it’s a mistake to compare this film to the Zola novel or the Renoir film, LA BETE HUMAINE. HUMAN DESIRE isn’t really the same story, even though it shares some externals with the source materials. It’s not the story of a “human beast,” but of a cold man who gives in to passion and desire for only a brief moment, but then abandons desire in order to live a safe, comfortable life.

Grahame’s Vicky couldn’t succumb to the status quo of her life. Her desires were too strong and in the end, she had to pay the price for them. She is the protagonist of Lang’s film, not Glenn Ford. HUMAN DESIRE is a noir that gives us a taste of the femme fatales’ point of view, and none other than the ultimate B-girl, Gloria Grahame, delivers.

Posted on March 23rd, 2011 at 7:08pm.