Thoughts on the film by Fritz Lang
The characters, like trains in perpetual motion, are on
a collision course, unable to change track. The lines of the iron girders that
form this interconnected network of railroads and tramlines, become like the
bars of a prison cell, encircling and ensnaring these characters from the
outset.
Pertinent visual metaphors abound in Fritz Lang's late
melodrama, which adapts the 1890 novel "La Bête humaine" by Émile
Zola, and in the process translates it into the language of the American film
noir.
Better writers than me have touched upon this emphasis
on trains and train tracks, which dominates the iconography of Lang's film to
such an extent that it seems pathological, rather than aesthetical. These are
characters moving headlong in the same direction, their guilt, complicity and desperation
propelling them on along this journey to a (final) destination that can only
end in bloodshed or desolation. Criminality is the train that these characters
board and the question throughout is whether any of them will have the
foresight or the resilience to get off before it's too late.
Human Desire [Fritz Lang, 1954]:
I once outlined an essay in which I argued the history
of cinema was trains and bridges; that the birth of cinema was defined by the
two. The train in particular is an appropriate metaphor for narrative cinema; something
that progresses in a straight-line from point A to point B. This connection is
something that Alain Robbe-Grillet recognized in his masterful post-modern meta-film,
Trans-Europ-Express (1966).
A characteristic film noir motif: the silhouette of
the venetian blinds becoming an onscreen signifier of the unlawful; the bars of
a prison cell, or the criminal act itself. But is the character here outside the
law or imprisoned by their own emotions, or the world they inhabit?
While the subtext here is intelligent and lends the work
a certain depth, Human Desire (1954) is nonetheless one of the weakest of Lang's
films for me. As a melodrama I found it inert and unconvincing. Glenn Ford is
too old to play the protagonist, who should've been a guy in his early twenties,
naive and quick to please.
In films like Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway
(1997), David Lynch proved that these dangerous love triangles work best when
the guy in the middle of it all is some dumb young sap blinded by his lust for
an older woman. Ford was almost forty here and looks older. That his character
spends many of his earlier scenes flirting with a supposedly eighteen and
interested Kathleen Case, makes his sudden seduction by fading goodtime girl Gloria
Grahame all the more unlikely.
However, what's really missing from Human Desire is
Lang's incredible formalism. While it's intelligently made and has some attractive
imagery, it feels bland and safe in comparison to Lang's greatest films, which
were often loaded with expressionist lighting, dreamlike sequences and dynamic
shot compositions. Compare the film in question to more masterful works, such
as Spies (1928), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933),
Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Secret Beyond the Door (1948), The Big Heat (1953)
and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) to name a few, and we see not only a
weaker emphasis on cinematic style, but a much less rich and well-developed
psychological or self-reflexive element to how the story is constructed and
unfolds.
While not a terrible film, Human Desire feels like a work
that could've been directed by any anonymous studio practitioner. It feels somewhat
generic, lacking the mesmeric, somnambulistic quality of Lang's great expressionist
psychodramas, and feeling especially weak in comparison to analogous crime/noir
classics like In a Lonely Place (1950), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess
(1953), Kiss Me Deadly (1955) or Touch of Evil (1958).
