Human Desire

While several literary works have spawned two different film adaptations included in this collection (see Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Simenon’s The Man from London), only two works are represented here in the form of three different films: the first is James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the second is Frenchman Émile Zola’s naturalistic masterpiece, La Bête humaine, which was adapted in France by Jean Renoir (La Bête humaine, 1938), in Argentina by Daniel Tinayre (La bestia humana, 1957), and in the United States by Fritz Lang (Human Desire). While Lang’s version is, of course, the most “Hollywood” of the three, it still captures some of the novel’s desperation and subversiveness while updating it from fin de siècle France to postwar America. Glenn Ford plays train conductor Jeff Warren who witnesses co-worker Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford) and his wife Vicki (Gloria Grahame) exiting the train compartment where a murdered man’s body is discovered later that night. Making Vicki’s acquaintance while disembarking, Jeff feels an immediate and mutual physical attraction which keeps him quiet when called as a witness during the inquest. The two begin a torrid affair behind the back of the distrustful and violent Carl whose existence grows so inconvenient that Vicki one day asks Jeff to eliminate him. “Is it difficult to kill a man?” she asks about Jeff’s experience during the war, hoping murder is just as easy on the street as on the battlefield. Lang effectively builds suspense, particularly around Crawford’s combustible performance, and varies the moods through subtle and not-so-subtle changes in lighting (note the haze along the train platform, the deep shadows in the rail yard, etc.).