Viki Buckley: “When I first came to live here I thought I’d never get used to the trains…”
The sound of passing trains, a maze of railroad tracks (entwining, separating… just like people’s lives), steam coming out from engines.. (the heat of desire…) are always present in this bleak movie.
The cold, gloomy railway stations are the setting for this destructive love story.
Human desire - a melodrama with noir aesthetics and pessimism - is based on a novel by Émile Zola which had already been made into a film by Jean Renoir.
Viki (Gloria Grahame) is a femme fatale who drags Corea war veteran Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) to a passionate love affair. She plans the murder of her violent jealous husband Carl (Broderick Crawford) – a fact that may remind us of Double Indemnity.
In this movie Columbia was taking advantage of the success of the couple Ford-Grahame in “The Big Heat” (also directed by Lang); the chemistry between the two stars is still there but not as thrilling as it was in the former film.
3 comments:
Human Desire is a movie that I really like because it shows how natural it is to have desires. I think it is a very sensual movie.
I liked this blog, i think is very interesting, most of all for the new ideas that this blog talk.
Although it's not one of his noir masterworks, this grim tale of infidelity and blackmail provides a reminder that even Fritz Lang's workaday efforts remain vivid and compelling. Updated for the conformist '50s and relocated to the fringes of working-class Middle America by screenwriter Alfred Hayes, Emile Zola's source material retains its sordid tone and tragic scope. As with many thrillers, the emphasis is on an intricate plot driven by the basest of human motivations.
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