All Aboard for Fritz Lang’s Train-centric Noir of Fatal Passions
DIRECTED BY FRITZ LANG/1954
BLU-RAY STREET DATE: JULY 11, 2023/KL STUDIO CLASSICS
Sometimes when it comes to human desire, there are no words. In the case of Fritz Lang’s 1954 Film Noir Human Desire, such is the case for the first several minutes. Considering the filmmakers’ earlier career phase in 1920s Germany as one of the global titans of silent blockbusters, the lack of verbiage is nothing if not apropos.
Lost in thought while lackadaisically co-engineering a passenger train is Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), newly back from the war with nothing to show for it. Over and over again, Warren must point out that “they ran out of metals” before they got to him, or, he in fact did not ascend the ranks, or even how, thanks to voracious superior officers, there were no pretty girls left for him while serving overseas. “Aww, poor Jeff”, coos the teasing young Ellen (Kathleen Case), the innocent yet sultry grown daughter of his friend and coworker, Alec (Edgar Buchanan). Don’t be fooled; she wants him. Her parents seem to recognize this- and don’t seem to mind. And yet… Jeff is unable to resist the dangerous allure of another. Enter the unhappily married Vicki (a glassy Gloria Grahame).
Five years before Alfred Hitchcock oh-so-naughtily cut from Cary Grant desperately reaching for Eva Marie Saint as she hung from Mount Rushmore to him pulling her into their sleeping car’s bed and then to the train itself speeding into a tunnel, Fritz Lang was pushing this sixty-five-ton metaphor down particularly dark tracks. Perhaps the locomotive associations, as downright carnal as they are throughout Human Desire, are the final click of Lang’s life in Hollywood coming into place. It is, after all, a key portion of his own self-mythology that he valiantly and narrowly fled his former life and loves in Germany as Joseph Goebbels closed in on recruiting him for the Third Reich. Lang fled by train.
Human Desire one hundred percent lives up to its title as it’s every bit the lurid and lusty classic Noir thriller we want it to be. While it’s impossible to know until the end whether the two-timing Vicki qualifies as an official “femme fatale”, the film has illicit, barely tethered passions commingling with fiery homicide throughout. When Vicki’s jealous and down-on-his-luck husband, Carl (a typically blustery Broderick Crawford) puts two and two together regarding the intimate lengths his wife has gone to salvage his employment at the rail yard, breakdown is imminent. The truth cuts brutally… and not just for his abusive self.
Fritz Lang is no stranger to Film Noir, particularly in this era of the 1950s. Human Desire arrived in a flurry of similarly styled films by the director, after Clash by Night (1952), The Big Heat (1953), and The Blue Gardenia (1953) but before While the City Sleeps (1956). In 1945, he delivered one of the landmark Film Noirs, Scarlet Street (which is scheduled to arrive on Blu-ray and 4K via KL Studio Classics in January). None that I’ve seen heretofore disappoint. That the ruthless wrap-up of Human Desire somehow ducked the Hays Code is a testament to shifting rails of the world… the very world that the Film Noir form had been grappling with ever since the boys came home from the war, forever changed in a forever changed land.
According to the film’s spoiler-ific trailer (typical of many decades worth of older movies), all the central relationships of the film (Glenn Ford: “pal”; Gloria Grahame: “lady”; Broderick Crawford: “husband”) are “in name only!”. Is such lip service the actuality of crooked human desire? Or is it simply the broken results? In Human Desire, the answer is perpetually “yes” when it should be “no”, and perhaps not acknowledged when it should be “yes”. The trailer, along with trailers for a few other classic Noirs offered by KL Studio Classics, is present as an extra on the label’s recent Blu-ray release of the film.
KLSC’s Blu-ray release does a great job of presenting Lang’s latter-day shadowy visuals. Human Desire may not present as particularly expressionistic, but the mood works its crooked mojo in a comparatively subtle way to earlier Film Noir. The offers no commentary track. Instead, a ten-minute video consideration of the film, “Terror and Desire”, by contemporary actress Emily Mortimer has been ported over from a not-recent previous DVD release. Mortimer communicates her fascination with this film eloquently, reminding us that when it comes to human desire, so many of us are simply along for the ride. In the case of Fritz Lang’s trip, however, few will regret having their ticket punched.