- Based on a novel by Émile Zola and directed by Fritz Lang, Human Desire is surprisingly unexciting, considering how much talent is assembled in this film. Any one of Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, or Broderick Crawford should have been enough to hold the audience's attention for at least 90 minutes. Instead, Edgar Buchanan, familiar to me only as the guy from Petticoat Junction, and the even more obscure young actress Kathleen Case somehow deliver the most engaging performances in the film. The other three just seem to be sleepwalking their way toward a pretty standard set of film noir fates.
- The basic situation is that violently jealous husband Carl Buckley (Crawford) accidentally drives his disinterested wife Vicki (Grahame) into the arms of John Owens (Grandon Rhodes), who ends up dead in a traincar for his troubles. Train engineer Jeff Warren (Ford) could testify that he saw Vicki leaving the dead man's sleeping car, but instead he decides to get mixed up with Vicki, too. In the meantime, Vicki just wants Jeff to kill Carl, which is understandable, given that Carl is a violent drunk who routinely tosses Vicki around the room.
- The only aspect of Human Desire that really impressed me were Lang's ample shots of trains whizzing by the camera or viewed from a great height. I've never really been all that enamored of trains, but I have to admit that Lang made both the locomotives themselves and the labyrinthine trainyards look every bit as interesting as a more typical film noir setting. Otherwise, the film takes a really long time to get anywhere, which is incidentally also how I feel every time I ride a train.
